1. A new layout engine that minimizes cross-platform discrepancies: if you are using absolute positioning in your app and are updating to 2.0 then you need to read this. You basically need to excise almost all uses of ‘auto’ or 0 for your width and height fields and use Ti.UI.SIZE or Ti.UI.FILL appropriately. You may have also worked around some issues with the older platform that you have to now discard.
2. Mobile Web: a new platform increases your reach as a developer and allows you to make your application available to Windows Mango and Blackberry 7 users through the web (2.1 CI build). Check it out here.
3. Cloud Services: we had a surge in use after just a few short days after launch for ACS. We currently have over 23,000 apps that have been enabled for ACS usage. The tremendous demand shows that we have hit a  nerve here with developers wanting to cloud enable their applications with minimal setup and overhead.
4.  New look and feel for our documentation. We borrowed from an open source engine to provide quick look up, open tabs of items that you’ve viewed, and a snappy new look and feel. Arthur has been very diligent about reviewing every API, checking with the developers, and rewriting and adding samples for clarity.

Last time I mentioned our plans to build a rock solid platform, establish a predicable release cadence, and create a scalable QA organization. I believe we have made good progress in each of these areas:

1. We have fixed over 640 platform bugs since the start of the year. That’s not unexpected given that we scaled out QA (see below). We’ll continue to emphasize this moving forward–we want to provide you with a platform that you can count on!
2. We delivered the 1.8.1 and 1.8.2 services packs at the end of January and February respectively. The 2.0 release was officially launched on 4/17 although the software was ready to go and out on github on 3/31. We delayed while we revamped the web site and got our billing back end polished off for launch. The next service pack (2.0.2) is on track for the end of this month and 2.1 is in active development. Note that with the launch of 2.0 we have officially stopped supporting 1.7.x. If you haven’t already considered upgrading your app to the latest 2.0 release then now is the time. I want to thank the team and especially my leadership: Chung, Ingo, Neeraj, Thomas, and Wei for pulling out the stops and marching everyone to the same drumbeat. It isn’t always easy!
3. Thomas has been busy scaling out QA and has established a partnership to do regression testing which has resulted in a surge of bug reports. This is a good thing as I’d rather know what bugs we have rather than not. We’ve done more testing than ever before on our applications and platform and put in place an awesome test case management system in order to measure and manage our work.

What’s going on with our platform support? Jeff stood up on stage at BlackBerry world and announced support for BlackBerry 10 OS. We’re furiously at work on this and are integrating UI functionality as fast as RIM can throw SDKs at us. What about Windows Apollo, you ask? It’s very strategic for us so stay tuned.

In the end, I still have a burning need for talent here in the Bay Area. We’ve added many folks but are still eager to expand our team. I need iOS, Android, Blackberry Playbook, or Javascript developers and cloud, mobile, and automation QA engineers, and admins for ITOps. Snacks and drinks are free, the fun is liberally available, and we work hard on good code. Send us your resume. Did I mention the fresh churros at the last beer bash?

Carl Orthlieb is Vice President of Engineering at Appcelerator.  Carl is responsible for all product engineering for Appcelerator including the Titanium SDK and Studio, Analytics, Cloud Services, and IT Operations.

Summary:

This is the first part of a blog series that details how to develop a mobile application that is backed by MongoDB and a PaaS.  MongoDB makes a great companion to this mobile application given its ability to shard and the nature of being able to store JSON documents with little data manipulation required.  In this blog post, part one of the series, we will go over the background of the application and discuss the features we are going to build.

Background:

I started developing iOS based applications shortly after the arrival of the iPhone on the market.  Having been a Java and PHP developer for my entire career, switching to objective-c was a tough challenge for me.  I had to remember basic programming methodologies and patterns that I haven’t used since college.  I had to remember that when using the C programming language, that garbage collection doesn’t happen automagically.  You have to allocate your memory and then when you are done, free that memory up.  I also had to learn a new IDE (XCode) to take advantage of the profiling tools and other features that is required when doing native iOS development.  XCode has improved significantly over the years, but in my opinion, it’s still a far cry from what I expect from an IDE.

To write my first iOS application, it required nearly two months of work at the cadence of 30-40 hours per week.  To my delight, after releasing the application, the market for the application was larger that I had anticipated.  Users were writing great reviews and requesting more features. 

Shortly after releasing my first iOS based application, Google decided to enter the smartphone market with their android based sdk and devices.  This should have been great news for most software developers but for me, a part time mobile developer, it wasn’t.  I now had users requesting my application for android devices as well as for the new iPad and other tablets that were hitting the market.  I didn’t have the free time to port my application to the android sdk as it would have required another two months of software development as well as maintaining two separate code streams for patches and updates.

About 8 months ago, I heard about a company called Appcelerator and their Titanium SDK.  This SDK would allow me to code using javascript but target native UI controls for an array of devices.  This sounded like heaven as most of the applications that I write are productivity or novelty based applications that don’t rely heavily on 3D graphics.  I set out to learn the titanium SDK and was able to develop the BeerShift sample application over a period of two days.

About BeerShift:

At OpenShift, we enjoy local craft beers and the social aspects of having a pint while discussing the latest trends in software development and deployment.  One night, over a pint, we thought it would be cool if we could quickly read a description of the beer and brewery before ordering.  We kept discussing the app and of course feature creep started setting in.  Before we ended the night, we decided to develop a mobile-based application that would allow a user to search for beers, and then log when and where they drank it.  Because the team was split between using iOS and Android based phones, we needed it to work on both devices and sync the information via a backend service.  Of course, all of this had to be available via the web as well.

This was a great opportunity for me to start learning Titanium so I set out to develop the application.  The biggest unknown was where to get a freely available database of beers that I could search.  I researched this question and did some google searching but didn’t really come up with any providers that met my needs.  Luckily, while speaking at a PHP Users Group in Raleigh, NC, I met a couple of guys who owned a startup called thebrewerydb.com.  They had all of the information that I needed in order to develop the fun little sample app.  I invited them out for a pint after the user group and we discussed the details.  A few days later I had an API key and was ready to get my Titanium Javascript on.

Want a quick preview of what we will be building?  Check out the video showing the application.

BeerShift has a tabbed based UI that consists for 4 main screens.  Drink, Drank, Kegstand, and Settings.

The settings tab presents the user with username and password input fields.  If the username does not exist in the MongoDB database, the user will be prompted if they want to create a new user.

The drink tab is the heart of the application.  This tab allows the uses to enter in a beer name and will return a result of all beers and breweries that match the search string.  The results are retrieved via a REST API call to the openshift server and presented to the user in a table view.  The user can select a a beer from the list and then select to “Drink It”.

Once the user has decided to log drinking a beer, the drinking event will be recorded on both the drank tab and the keg stand tab.

The keg stand tab will allow the user of the application to view the 50 most recent beers drank by any user of the application.

In the next blog post of this series, I will detail the installation of applications and tools needed to begin with development of the BeerShift application.

All of the source code for this application, including the backend REST API and MongoDB integration, is available on github.com/gshipley

Over time, the scope and requirements for these tools have increased significantly so we have decided to evaluate the the structure of the build system itself. We have put together a specification to overhaul the existing build system and make it more extensible. We have also decided to move away from Python based tooling to node.js based tooling. We had a good debate internally about the technology choice and, in the end, it made sense for us to adopt node.js as we are a Java Script platform company. Node.js is young and has few short comings so we will write modules to overcome these limitations and contribute them back to the community.

Please review and provide your feedback (leave it on the wiki page itself) on the specification. We are on a tight deadline so your early feedback is appreciated. We will review and incorporate the feedback by the end of this week.

https://wiki.appcelerator.org/display/community/Titanium+Command+Line+Utility+Specification

The options to show or hide inherited members and property accessors on the API Docs are still there, but now they’re now in the Show menu over on the right.

The Filter class members box is a very handy way of finding that elusive property or method. You’ll also find an Expand All button if you want to scroll through all of the properties, methods and events without manually expanding each item.

There are still many things to improve, but I’m happy to have the first version of our new doc site in the wild, and I’m proud of the work the documentation team has done over the last six months:

• Completely revised the API docs for about 2/3 of the modules and objects in the Titanium Mobile API.
• Updated existing guides, added new guides sections, and removed obsolete material.
• Fixed almost 300 doc bugs.

For a before-and-after comparison, see the VideoPlayer doc then and now.

We’ve made a good start, but we need your help. If you find a doc that’s wrong or missing information, or if you just feel it could be improved, please let us know. We always encourage filing bugs. For questions and general feedback, feel free to contact myself, Tim Poulsen or Paul Dowsett.

Behind the Scenes

We really liked the navigation in JSDuck, Sencha’s open-source documentation tool, so we used it as the front end for our Titanium documentation site. Our API documentation source format hasn’t changed: API docs are written in the TDoc format we rolled out with Release 1.8. The TDoc tools were designed to generate multiple formats, so we added a generator for JSDuck.

The guides content is authored in our wiki and exported for the doc site using a custom script.

What’s Next?

So what’s next for the Appcelerator documentation team? Here’s what we have on our roadmap for 2.1.0:

If you’d like to contribute to the Titanium documentation effort, there are many ways to help:

• If you find something wrong, or a page that needs more information, file a bug.
• Take it to the next level and submit a fix for an API doc issue.
• Join the crew: the Appcelerator documentation team is hiring.

Unlike previous versions of the BlackBerry OS, development tools will be available for Mac, Linux, and Windows users.  In a few hours, I will be demoing a very early version of this tooling integration within Titanium Studio.  The BlackBerry 10 simulator is a VMWare machine image, which runs on your machine via VMWare Fusion or the VMWare Player.  The Titanium build scripts interface with this virtual machine to deploy application updates.  The application its self is built using the BB 10 NDK tools, resulting in the same .bar application archive you’d get in the native development workflow.

We will be looking to share updates on our progress with the community ASAP, once we have a stable build. BB 10, by everything we have seen here at BlackBerry World 2012, looks to be a very strong entry into the competitive mobile OS market. To Appcelerator and our developer community, it underscores the importance of maintaining cross-platform agility, while still taking advantage of rich native platform features – the mobile platform war is far from over. We look forward to helping all our developers succeed on BlackBerry 10!

Hey guys, hope you’re playing with the latest release of Titanium as there are have been some great features added including ACS (Appcelerator Cloud Services). This week my featured developers are from different sides of the globe; William Martinez is based in the US and Kosuke Isobe is from Japan.

They have stood out from the crowd with their app development skills and helping to contribute to the Ti community. I’ll talk about William & his FaceTouch App and then I’ll discuss Kosuke’s contribution of the TiPlatformConnect OAuth library.

I noticed the FaceTouch App a number of months ago via the Q&A section, I downloaded it & had a little play – I loved it, my 3 year old even loved it! I updated to the full version a few weeks ago & noticed a number of new features, the great UI is so easy to use. If you haven’t already, I advise downloading it free from the AppStore.

“Facetouch is a really funny photo booth studio! You have hats, wigs, glasses, hair, beards and a lot of fashion accessories to make people or pets look just awesome in your pictures! Transform your pictures in a fancy and simple way. Facetouch has a lot of real-like high definition, carefully and well-designed objects that include even shadow … Just chose an object and zoom it, rotate it, move it and scale it to make it fit in your picture!”

William’s team (@inzori) has worked with clients from all around the world for the last 15 years. They speak English, Spanish and Swedish fluently.

Interview with William Martinez

1) What gave you the idea to create your FaceTouch app?
We’ve created a small puzzle game for my kid where you have to place shapes where they belong, recognize objects like forks, knives and glasses and arrange them on the table, etc… That was the kick off of FaceTouch.
Once we learned how the drag and drop, scale, rotate, flip, place, etc any object with Titanium, we found that we had built a nice engine to ‘easily’ build these kind of applications over it.

We wanted to create some realistic face booth application. We found that most of the existing similar applications at the appStore work with cartoons, drawings and poor quality graphics… no real life pictures or accessories… some are funny but you get no real looking results. … we decided to go for it.

2) Why did you choose the Appcelerator Titanium route?
Titanium is the easiest and fastest way to create an iPhone/iPad high quality application. Although the iOS SDK is not 100% mapped, you have almost everything you may need to deliver your application to the AppStore, and you may find or create a module if you don’t.

3) How long did it take to design, create, test & deploy the app?
We decided to co-work with a professional design this time.
The results are amazing as you can see, a full HD application ready for iPhone and iPad, however, it took a lot more time to finish the application as designers are really … how to say it… they like their work to look not just good but perfect.
As you know we (developers) are not that kind of person, we want things to be finished fast and it’s ok as long as they work as supposed :) … so … as the designer went over and over again through the same screens, changing colors, changing buttons and moving a pixel from here to there… we had the time to create more and more features, create ObjectiveC modules, etc.

So, it took almost 2 months to finish the first version. Our beta testers did a great job! They were our friend’s kids, my kid and ourselves that had a funny time doing our “job”.

After 3 months we decided to go live at the AppStore and continue working with a lot of new objects and functionality for a new version.

4) What parts of the Ti API did you use to create the user interaction?
Well… I can tell you which parts we did not use… that would be easier! I think we have used almost every part of the API but Android specific parts.

5) Have you developed any other apps in Titanium if so, what are they?
We have developed two other public applications:

• Undercover Media – a highly customizable application that records audio/video and takes pictures without being noticed. You can even browse the web while you are recording video!
• Visual Noise – a free application that is part of a bigger project that may help people with hearing problems. This application is really a rip of the alert system where a vibration/visual alert is raised when a noise peak is detected. We decided to deploy it to the appstore and see if we could get some feedback and suggestions from users.
• Private applications – we have also developed three private applications like a payment gateway for a mayor online payment company and two other very specific applications requested by clients.
• MarketPlace – we have developed some Ti modules that you may find here.

Real world app code example

William has kindly sampled some of his code from within the actual help to other Ti Devs:

[app.js gist]

Titanium.App.ISIPAD = Ti.Platform.osname == 'ipad';
Ti.include('/programs/main.js');

var ff = {};
ff.app = {};
ff.ui = {};

// create tab group
ff.app.tabGroup = Titanium.UI.createTabGroup({
backgroundColor: '#000'
});

// create the main home screen (this function creates the home screen and is defined in main.js)
ff.app.mainwin = ff.ui.createMainWindow();

// create loading window "splash"
ff.app.loadWin = Ti.UI.createWindow({
top:0,left:0,right:0,bottom:0,
tabBarHidden: true,
navBarHidden: true,
backgroundImage: Titanium.App.ISIPAD ? 'images/background_splash_ipad.jpg' : 'images/background_splash.jpg' ,
fullscreen: true,
url: 'programs/splash.js',
tabGroup: ff.app.tabGroup, // pass the main tabgroup
mainTab: tabMain // pass the tab where main is
});

var tabLoad = Titanium.UI.createTab({
window:ff.app.loadWin
});
var tabMain = Titanium.UI.createTab({
window:ff.app.mainwin
});

ff.app.tabGroup.addTab(tabLoad);
ff.app.tabGroup.addTab(tabMain);

ff.app.tabGroup.setActiveTab(tabLoad);
ff.app.tabGroup.open();

[programs/splash.js gist]

var splash = Ti.UI.currentWindow;

// do whatever you want.. animations.. put a label "loading..." and animate it (remember to play with delays and durations to make this screen last longer)

// and when you finish loading, just change the active tab.

splash.tabGroup.setActiveTab(splash.mainTab);

Kosuke Isobe – TiPlatformConnect OAuth Library

Kosuke’s a web programmer for internet media business called OpenSmile based in Japan. He’s only been invovled in Titanium for a year after he got introduced to the Donayama blog. He has worked on a few Titanium Apps (Japanese Only), such as Prize info and Rock-paper-scissors game.

Have you ever wanted to allow a user to grant a third party site access to their information stored with another service provider, without sharing their access permissions or the full extent of their data, well read on….

I came across TiPlatformConnect on Twitter, it was a fork of @ebryn‘s great twitter-titanium library on Github. Kosuke explained to me that he “required OAuth of Twitter in my app. At such time, I found twitter-titanium. This library is very easy learn, I was able to incorporate my app immediately. Then, when connecting to other platforms, I have continued to use this to extend the library”.

He has expanded it front a Twitter OAuth library to the following:

• Tumblr
• Mixi (Japanese SNS)
• Foursquare
• Flickr (in development)
• Github
• Linkedin
• Google
• Etsy
• Hatena

If you want to expand the usage of this great resource, please fork it and share all your findings with the Ti community.

A big thanks to my featured developers!

Code Strong

Welcome to Titanium 2.0!

Thursday, April 19, 9am PST

Register for the webinar!

In this session, Appcelerator CTO Nolan Wright, Product Manager Jo Ann Bucker, and Platform Evangelist Kevin Whinnery will be on hand to discuss and demo the new features in Titanium 2.0, and discuss what’s next for Appcelerator in 2012.

Titanium 2.0 Overview (Europe)

Thursday, April 19, 10am PST

Register for the webinar!

In this session, Appcelerator Platform Evangelist Kevin Whinnery will present on what’s new in Titanium 2.0 for European developers.  Please stop in after your work day is through and ask your questions live!

Titanium 2.0 Overview (US East Coast)

Thursday, April 19, 4pm PST

Register for the webinar!

In this session, the Washington D.C. Titanium developer community will present on Titanium at a high level, and brief developers on the new features in 2.0 alongside Appcelerator engineers.  Drop in, learn, and ask your questions live!

Titanium 2.0 Q&A (Spanish)

Thursday, April 19, 6:30pm PST

Register for the webinar!

In this session, Appcelerator developers (in conjunction with the Mexico City Titanium Meetup) will answer questions specifically for Spanish language speakers. Si hablas español, únete a nosotros para este evento.

Titanium 2.0 Overview (West Coast)

Thursday, April 19, 7:30pm PST

Register for the webinar!

Live from our developer meetup in Mountain View, Appcelerator celebrates the release of 2.0 with our local developer community.  Presentations on what’s new in version 2.0 will be shared with the local crowd, and with other west coast audiences via webinar.  Join us to celebrate and learn about 2.0!

Titanium 2.0 Q&A (Japanese)

Friday, April 20, 4:30am PST

Register for the webinar!

Live from Tokyo, one of the most active meetup groups in the world will field Titanium questions in Japanese.  Please join us to ask your question live!

Thanks, and we hope to see you tomorrow!

Studio 2.0.1 highlights

• Appcelerator Cloud Services. Add cloud services either from the new project wizard or to an existing project.
• Module Management: Manage directly from within the Titanium Studio GUI via the tiapp.xml editor.
• App support: Third-party providers can now hook into our publishing workflow. App stores can register within the interface and allow simplified deployment from inside Titanium Studio to an online location.
• Content Assist: No need to be save files in order to get content assist for your user-defined functions.  We’ve also added content assist on both hover and Dynamic Help for the Titanium API.
• Xcode 4.3 support.

Other Useful Functionality

• Type /** before a JavaScript function to automatically add a documentation header.
• Jump from a function to its definition via the F3 key.
• Right-click on a project to open the analytics for that application.
• Scroll away from the bottom of the console to auto-lock.

New Views

• A Snippets view that provides easy access to the complete list of snippets shipped with Studio, as well as simple ways to filter, preview and edit the list.
• A Servers view for stopping, starting and restarting external servers used for preview.

Additional Changes

• We’ve reworked the publishing workflow to make iOS and Android distribution more intuitive. Recently-run configurations will be added to the Run history so you can easily re-run them without needing to configure the wizard once again.
• Emulators and Simulators now support custom launch arguments.
• We now validate the whole project (as opposed to just the current file) as part of the build step, and we’ll warn you before launching if the current project has errors.
• Studio also won’t index or validate any files under the “builds” folder.
• Studio 2.0 is now built on top of Eclipse 3.7.2.

Read the Release Notes for additional details on all improvements available in this release.

Updating Titanium Studio

You should be automatically prompted to update your Titanium Studio software. If you do not see the prompt, you can select “Check for Updates” from the “Help” menu from within Titanium Studio.

Once you’ve updated Titanium Studio, you’ll then get an update for the Titanium Mobile SDK.

Brace yourselves, Titanium fans. The latest helping of Titanium goodness, is now available hot off the update servers.

Titanium Mobile SDK 2.0.1 is now available.

We’ve been working on this feature release for last few months and I’m sure that you’ll find this release as exciting as I do.

Titanium Mobile SDK 2.0.1 builds on the strengths of Release 1.8, adding numerous new features, improving parity across different platforms and addressing over 700 issues. This release takes the Titanium platform to the next level but I will let you be the judge.

Highlights of the SDK 2.0.1 feature set include:

• Integration with Appcelerator Cloud Services (formerly CocoaFish) to cloud-enable Titanium applications.
• Mobile Web (formerly HTML5 platform) release candidate.
• New Titanium Documentation Site with much improved documentation and examples
• Composite layouts to address UI parity issues across different platforms. A migration guide is available to help you migrate your applications.
• Well-defined module API for module developers.
• More flexible geolocation functionality.
• Xcode 4.3 and iOS 5.1 support.
• Android V8 – Better memory management
• Android r19 toolset support

We also processed quite a few community pull requests for this release. We appreciate the effort and commitment from our wonderful community and this release would not have been possible without your support.

Read the Release Notes for additional details on all improvements available in this release.

Download and Installation

For More Information

For more information, you may view the related API Documentation: Titanium Mobile SDK 2.0.1 API docs.