I intend this to be a set of seven tutorials to help beginners understand how to work with the Titanium mobile framework.
The guys at did a great job with the framework allowing to us, the web developers, to have access on native applications for mobile devices ( Apple iDevices, Android and soon BlackBerry).
The framework reached the 1.4 version and each day more developers seem to be interested in using it – especially because it’s free. The community is great and you’ll find answers on almost any problem you might have. But for the beginners is still a little difficult to start. From here surged the idea of this set of tutorials in which I will try to cover the basics of the development process for iPhone and Android.
Each post will contain a header with the previous tutorials written, for an easy follow. It will also have a footer part where some links of interest will be published.
It won’t be daily posts, I will write when I’ll have enough time to test and write the examples. I prefer a better written post to a fast one. And each post might be updated to add forgotten things (or to fix issues) so don’t forget to bookmark it.
The provided code will be licensed under the MIT license so you will be able to use it as you wish.
Basically you need only Javascript knowledge. Some OOP coding routine would be great but is not mandatory ( we learn on the fly .
Why “at least for a start” ? Well, later you might miss some functions and methods these libraries have (let’s say the array methods like filter, each, unique, etc… ) but you will be able to implement this by your own and avoid a 150k library.
You won’t learn Javascript (you need to know it already). You will not learn ObjC and/or Java (in the end this is the purpose of Titanium). I will try to provide the code for each thing you will learn about as well as screenshots and maybe videos.
And at last
Some things about navigation, windows, views and tabs – the basics of the interface. I will try to briefly explain what does each of these elements and how to use them.
Tables and pickers (or option pickers, the ‘select’ tag equivalent)
Ajax (actually XHR) – on how to use the HttpClient for webpages, XML, JSON and YQL; The webview – how to embed html code in your apps.
Media – images, movies and sounds
Some eye-candy with animations and transforms
About orientation and accelerometer.
This will be a post-tutorials day where I’ll sum up the lessons, add links and so on.
I know I said seven days and in the end are 9, but this one and the last do not count as “learning” days. There is a lot of stuff left out like scrollviews, sliders, some modules – Facebook? – more advanced techniques – like app events – but hopefully these will be the subject of another tutorials.
Let me know your thoughts, if you have ideas of what should I write about – remember that this is a beginner’s guide – or to ask questions.
See you in day 1.
( Linux / OsX / Windows ) can be found on Titanium Appcelerator blog, go get them
Check the Spanish version of this post: