Introduction to Cross-Platform Development With Appcelerator

Introduction to Cross-Platform Development With Appcelerator

on Jun 8th 2010 with 27 comments
Tutorial Details
  • Technology: Appcelerator
  • Difficulty: Beginner
  • Time to Complete: 15 - 30 Minutes

This tutorial will introduce you to the Appcelerator development process. You will learn the fundamentals of touch-interaction and UI positioning while becoming familiar with the Appcelerator development environment and build process. Your project in this tutorial will be a simple “Fortune Crunch” application like the one built in the “Introduction to iPhone SDK Development” tutorial by Mark Hammonds. You must have both the iPhone SDK and the Android SDK in order to test your code on both platforms.

Requirements:

  • For iPhone development with Appcelerator:

    • An Intel-based Mac running Mac OS X Snow Leopard version 10.6.2 or later.

      This is the latest requirement for iPhone SDK 3.2 development. Older versions of the SDK were compatible with OS X, 10.5, but these are no longer accessible on the Apple web site.

    • An Apple Developer Account.

      This is required to download the iPhone SDK 3.2, the Xcode IDE, and the iPhone Simulator. You will need to register for an Apple Developer account. Registration is free and will allow you to run applications in the iPhone Simulator. A free account is all that is needed for this tutorial, but to actually run your apps on a device or publish through the iTunes App Store you will need to pay to enroll in the iPhone Developer Program.

    • Xcode and the iPhone SDK 3.2.

      After logging into your developer account, download and install Xcode 3.2.2 and iPhone SDK 3.2 (or the latest available version).

  • For Android development with Appcelerator:

    • You must download and install the Android SDK.

    • Install the Android Development Tools (ADT) Eclipse plugin.

 
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John has been in Web Development since 1999 and is skilled in both server-side languages (Perl and Ruby) and client-side technologies (JavaScript, HTML, CSS). His skills lie not at the extremes of graphic design or server administration, but in the middle where people actually interact with a site. He strives to make that interaction as intuitive and pleasant as possible. He is currently employed at OmniTI.com and is increasingly doing Canvas, SVG and mobile development.  

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  • Daniel

    Thank you very much for this! I have also begun working with Titanium for Android and have been trying to find some well-put-together tutorials on how to use this program. The API documentation can be somewhat convoluted from the appcelerator website at times, so it’s always good to see a full application built from beginning to end. Hopefully we’ll see more of these Titanium tutorials!

  • http://www.clementbongibault.com Clément Bongibault

    Very interesting video of introduction to Appcelerator :)
    Thanks ;)

  • Gareth

    Finally a decent look into developing with Titanium!
    More please!

  • http://connormontgomery.com Connor Montgomery

    Ahh! Wonderful! Great tutorial, and thank you so much. Finally nice to see some vids about it outside of Appcelerator’s website. Great job!

  • http://www.mattonik.sk Martin Maruša

    Great introductory video. Now I can really start developing mobile apps :) Looking forward to more videos.

  • http://www.scottcorgan.com Scott Corgan

    Good, let’s keep PCs out of this…

  • http://www.madeofwin.de Ben

    More please! :)

  • http://www.jamieholliday.co.uk jamie

    Excellent, been waiting for this. Well explained and easy to understand. Good job. More please!

  • Mauro

    Great! I’ve been waiting for this since mobiletuts came out!! I want to see more of this please.

  • Nick

    MOAR!!!!!!!!!!!!

  • http://newarts.at Drazen Mokic

    Very simple and nice but i am not sure about Titanium. Are they allowed to continue developing for the IPhone by Apple this way? If i remember its still an open discussion. Other Platforms like “Phonegap” are officially allowed to but i could not read that anywhere on the Appcelerator Site.

    • Mauro

      Yeah I’ve seen this at WWDC last days when Jobs presented the iPhone 4G, he said that the only 10% of apps that they reject it’s because they use external API’s. But I don’t care, I use Android :P

    • http://www.tonyvirelli.com Tony Virelli

      I have submitted 4 apps to the iTunes App Store. All were done in Titanium. All were accepted except one and the reason for rejection was “Limited Functionality”.

      So yes, apps created with Titanium will be approved! Remember… it uses xcode to compile the code!

      • http://newarts.at Drazen Mokic

        Thanks for the info Tony! When did you submit them, before or after the changes to the agreement?

  • Carlos

    FINALLY!
    I have been waiting for this stuff. Appcelerator’s site has hardly to no good tutorial videos at all. Their 100 series videos are meager and I don’t know about their 200 or 300 series because it cost $200 just to view them and $200/month for any support.
    It is a great product, but man, they are seriously charging way too much for their support. If these tutorials keep coming, I will definitely sign up for the premium membership on the Tuts sites.

    Thanks again!

    • http://newarts.at Drazen Mokic

      Thats so true. They are not able to create some useful tutorials for their product but want to charge so much money for some **** series and support.

    • Daniel

      There are some other good Titanium tutorials at cssgallery.info

      They’re all written for iPhone (personally I develop for Android at the moment) but you can get the basic idea from them.

  • Carlos

    Can the next tutorial be on webviews in Titanium? HTML pages. Supposedly they tote their product for people to be able to use their existing Javascript, HTML, and CSS skills, but their latest releases are geared towards Javascript more. I have not figured out the webview usage. Seemed harder than it needed to be to create one.
    Maybe show some integration of HTML, CSS, and jQuery in a Titanium project, mixed with the Titanium API language.
    I will try in the mean time and possibly post some vids about how to do a few things.

    • http://newarts.at Drazen Mokic

      I would not recommend using jQuery for Mobile Dev because it creates too much overhead with things like making functions possible on all browsers and so on. Jquery is not intended for mobile devices but there are some useful, jquery similar Javascript Frameworks like “XUI”.

  • Iván Gallego Sánchez

    Hi everyone,

    I’m planning to make a magazine for the iPad. Do you recommend to build it with HTML5 + JQuery or with iPhone SDK only (UIView, etc)… I’m thinking about making it in a webview loading a local HTML file and giving functionality with JQTouch.

    I think a post making a magazine for iPad in HTML5 will be very handy because everyone want to make things on it. What do you think?

  • http://kennethbsmith.com Ken

    What about rotating the text?

  • http://tomkruk.com Tom Kruk

    Do any (phone gap or appcelerator) have API for drawing on the screen with a finger then saving as an image in a database? Or is that only possible with Obj C?

  • http://www.fusiontechnology.com.au/ John Kamuchau

    Thank for the tut . Very informative and an easy way to get started .

  • http://andyhoward.id.au Andy

    Awesome work on this John. Thanks! Would love to see more Titanium demos.

  • Juliana

    Adorei….muito bom!!!!

  • http://www.francomusso.com franco Musso

    Excellent beginners’ tutorial, thanks so much. I really appreciated the approach of explaining how to write the code from scratch rather than the tutes out there that have you try to decipher and work around the default code. The code in titanium is so much easier to read than Objective C or Flex!