What this book covers

Chapter 1, Building Apps Using Native UI Components, begins our journey into Titanium Mobile by explaining the basics of layout and creating controls, before moving on to tabbed interfaces, web views, and how to add and open multiple windows.

Chapter 2, Working with Local and Remote Data Sources, helps you build yourself a mini-app that reads data from the Web using HTTP requests. We also see how to parse and iterate data in both XML and JSON formats. Then we see how to store and retrieve data locally using a SQLite database and some basic SQL queries.

Chapter 3, Integrating Google Maps and GPS, is where we add a MapView to our application and interact with it using annotations, geocoding, and events that track the user's location. We also go through the basics of adding routes and using the device's inbuilt compass to track our heading.

Chapter 4, Enhancing Your Apps with Audio, Video, and Camera, shows you how to interact with your device's media features using Titanium, including the camera, photo gallery, and audio recorder.

Chapter 5, Connecting Your Apps to Social Media and E-mail, teaches you to leverage Titanium and integrate it with Facebook, Twitter, and the e-mail capabilities of your mobile devices. Here, we also go through setting up a Facebook application and cover a brief introduction of the world of OAuth.

Chapter 6, Getting to Grips with Properties and Events, briefly runs through how properties work in Titanium and how you can get and set global variables in your app. In this chapter, you also learn how event listeners and handlers work and how to fire events, both from your controls and custom events from anywhere in your application.

Chapter 7, Creating Animations, Transformations and Implementing Drag and Drop, shows you how to create animations, and how to transform your objects using 2D and 3D matrices in Titanium. We also run through dragging and dropping controls and capturing screenshots using the inbuilt toImage functionality.

Chapter 8, Interacting with Native Phone Applications and APIs, is where you discover how to interact with native device APIs, such as the device's contacts and calendar. You also discover how to use local notifications and background services.

Chapter 9, Integrating Your Apps with External Services, dives deeper into OAuth and HTTP authentication, and also shows you how to connect to external APIs such as Yahoo! YQL and Foursquare. We also run through the setup and integration of push notifications into our Titanium apps.

Chapter 10, Extending Your Apps with Custom Modules, tells you how you can extend the native functionality in Titanium and add your own custom native modules using Objective-C and Xcode. Here, we run through a sample module from start to finish in Xcode to create short URLs using the Bit.ly service.

Chapter 11, Platform Differences, Device Information, and Quirks, shows you how to use Titanium to get information about the device, including important features such as making phone calls, checking the memory, and checking the remaining allocation of the battery. We also go through screen orientations and how to code differences between the iOS and Android platforms.

Chapter 12, Preparing Your App for Distribution and Getting It Published, demonstrates how to prepare and package your applications for distribution and sale on the iTunes App Store and Android Marketplace, along with a background of setting up and provisioning your apps correctly with provisioning profiles and development certificates.

Chapter 13, Implementing and Using URL Schemes, we will show how to use URL schemes to allow inter-app communication, from launching other apps to sending data between your own applications.

Chapter 14, Introduction to Alloy MVC, we will cover the Alloy MVC (Model, View Controller) framework, allowing you to build cross-platform applications faster than traditional Titanium mobile development.