Book Image

Appcelerator Titanium Smartphone App Development Cookbook Second Edition

Book Image

Appcelerator Titanium Smartphone App Development Cookbook Second Edition

Overview of this book

This book will take you through the process of building cross-platform, native UI applications for the mobile from scratch. You will learn how to develop apps, how to use GPS, cameras and photos and how to build socially connected apps. You will also learn how to package them for submission to the App Store and Google Play. This cookbook takes a pragmatic approach to creating applications in JavaScript from putting together basic UIs, to handling events and implementation of third party services such as Twitter, Facebook and Push notifications. The book shows you how to integrate datasources and server APIs, and how to use local databases. The topics covered will guide you to use Appcelerator Studio tools for all the mobile features such as Geolocation, Accelerometer, animation and more. You’ll also learn about Alloy, the Appcelerator MVC framework for rapid app development, and how to transfer data between applications using URLSchemes, enabling other developers to access and launch specific parts of your app. Finally, you will learn how to register developer accounts and publish your very own applications on the App Store and Google Play.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Appcelerator Titanium Smartphone App Development Cookbook Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Firing and capturing events


Much of Titanium is built around the concept of event-driven programming. If you have ever written code in Visual Basic, C#, Java or any other event-driven, object-orientated language, this concept will be familiar to you.

Each time a user interacts with a part of your application's interface or types something in a TextField, an event occurs. An event is simply an action that the user took (for example, a tap, scroll, or key press on the keyboard) and the object in which it took place (for example, on a button, or in a particular TextField). Additionally, some events can indirectly cause some other events to fire. For example, when the user selects a menu item that opens a window, it causes another event—the opening of the window.

There are two fundamental types of events in Titanium: those that you define yourself (a custom event) and those already defined by the Titanium API (a button click event is a good example of this).

In the following recipes, we will explore...