Download it from Appstore!

Help your children learn the alphabet by using this interactive, voice-based application with colourful cartoons and letters.

This educational application is based on 2 activities: one for learning the letters through examples (a female voice pronouncing the letter and the associated cartoons) and one for playing with the newly learned letters by choosing the correct one from a list of five.

The entire game is voice assisted allowing your child to start a session of learning or playing without the help of an adult.

The application allows you to choose between three levels of difficulty, to set a maximum number of letters per lesson and the number of minutes for the playing session.

Give your child the opportunity of learning the FunnyABC way! Download it from Appstore!

We just launched kids-apps.mobi, a showroom dedicated to gathering in one place iPad and iPhone/iPod touch applications for children.

It intends to be a collection of only the best applications for your kids offering a easy way to find what you are looking for without the need of searching the entire Appstore for this.

Upload your kids application

So if you have launched an application and would like to show in the kids-apps.mobi website, drop us a line using the form here.

We have launched the first ebook “Fairy Tales” by Brothers Grimm which contains a set of 62 beautiful bedtime stories.
It is built as an iPad application available for download on Appstore.

The application has a beautiful and usable interface allowing the user to choose the font, the size of the text and to switch to night-mode for a better reading experience during the night. It saves your current reading position in realtime so you can close the ebook at anytime and return to reading it later.

Chapter 1 stories

• Ashputtel
• Briar Rose
• Cat and mouse in partnership
• Cat-skin
• Clever Elsie
• Clever Gretel
• Clever Hans
• Doctor Knowall
• Frederick and Catherine
• Fundevogel
• Hans in luck
• Hansel and Gretel
• Iron Hans
• Jorinda and Jorindel
• King Grisly-beard

Chapter 2 stories

• Lily and the lion
• Little red riding hood
• Mother Holle
• Old sultan
• Rapunzel
• Rumpelstiltskin
• Snow-white and Rose-red
• Snowdrop
• Sweetheart Roland
• The 4 clever brothers
• The 7 ravens
• The 12 dancing princesses
• The 12 huntsmen
• The adventures of Chanticleer and Partlet
• The blue heart

Chapter 3 stories

• The dog and the sparrow
• The elves and the shoemaker
• The fisherman and his wife
• The fox and the cat
• The fox and the horse
• The frog-prince
• The golden bird
• The golden goose
• The goose-girl
• The juniper-tree
• The king of the golden mountain
• The little peasant
• The miser in the bush
• The mouse, the bird and the sausage
• The old man and his grandson
• The pink

Chapter 4 stories

• The queen bee
• The raven
• The robber bridegroom
• The salad
• The story of the youth who went forth to learn what fear was
• The straw the coal and the bean
• The three languages
• The travelling musicians
• The turnip
• The valiant little tailor
• The water of life
• The wedding of mister Fox
• The white snake
• The willow-wren and his bear
• The wolf and the seven little kids
• Tom thumb

Check the Spanish version of this post:
Cuentos de Hadas para iPad – nuestra aplicación ebook

Sometimes we need a true combobox for our projects but iPhone SDK does not have a native one (at least from what I know) and of course neither has Titanium.

So we will build one. A “true” iPhone or Ipad combobox that allows you to use the same textfield to input arbitrary text or select a value from a UIPicker element.

Updated with @CJ_Reed’s screenshot and code at the final of the tutorial.

Let’s see the video first, then we’ll get to work:

Ok, what do we need for this iPhone combobox ?

First of all we need a textField to accept input from the user. Titanium lets you set the leftButton and rightButton for this textField while constructing it. So we will take advantage of this and create a textField as it follows:

var my_combo = Titanium.UI.createTextField({
	hintText:"write your name or select one",
	height:40,
	width:300,
	top:20,
	borderStyle:Titanium.UI.INPUT_BORDERSTYLE_ROUNDED
});

Nothing special, a regular textField with a hint for the user that will disappear when the textField has a value.

Now we need to create the rightButton for it.

We will use a system button provided by Apple (Titanium.UI.iPhone.SystemButton.DISCLOSURE) only that we will rotate it 90 degrees to server our purpose. This is the code that creates the rightButton and the transformation applied to it.

var tr = Titanium.UI.create2DMatrix();
tr = tr.rotate(90);
 
var drop_button =  Titanium.UI.createButton({
		style:Titanium.UI.iPhone.SystemButton.DISCLOSURE,
		transform:tr
});

Now that we have the rightButton as we need it, the textField constructor becomes:

var my_combo = Titanium.UI.createTextField({
	hintText:"write your name or select one",
	height:40,
	width:300,
	top:20,
	borderStyle:Titanium.UI.INPUT_BORDERSTYLE_ROUNDED,
	rightButton:drop_button,
	rightButtonMode:Titanium.UI.INPUT_BUTTONMODE_ALWAYS
});

Please note the rightButtonMode:Titanium.UI.INPUT_BUTTONMODE_ALWAYS declaration, it makes this button visible all the time.

This is how it looks:

Pretty sexy, isn’t it? Well we’re not done yet.

Building the modal picker

When the user focuses on the textField, the keyboard appears – so we will have to build our picker to emulate the same behaviour and to maximize the usability of our form. For this we will need a Picker and two buttons: Done and Cancel. These two buttons will be positioned in a Toolbar, again, to emulate as good as possible the keyboard behaviour.

Let’s build everything:

var picker_view = Titanium.UI.createView({
	height:251,
	bottom:0
});
 
var cancel =  Titanium.UI.createButton({
	title:'Cancel',
	style:Titanium.UI.iPhone.SystemButtonStyle.BORDERED
});
 
var done =  Titanium.UI.createButton({
	title:'Done',
	style:Titanium.UI.iPhone.SystemButtonStyle.DONE
});
 
var spacer =  Titanium.UI.createButton({
	systemButton:Titanium.UI.iPhone.SystemButton.FLEXIBLE_SPACE
});
 
var toolbar =  Titanium.UI.createToolbar({
	top:0,
	items:[cancel,spacer,done]
});
 
var picker = Titanium.UI.createPicker({
		top:43
});
picker.selectionIndicator=true;
 
var picker_data = [
	Titanium.UI.createPickerRow({title:'John'}),
	Titanium.UI.createPickerRow({title:'Alex'}),
	Titanium.UI.createPickerRow({title:'Marie'}),
	Titanium.UI.createPickerRow({title:'Eva'}),
	Titanium.UI.createPickerRow({title:'James'})
];
 
picker.add(picker_data);
 
picker_view.add(toolbar);
picker_view.add(picker);

The code is a little long but is not rocket science. Some stuff to talk about though:

• Everyting is wrapped inside a view – picker_view – because we will have to animate like the keyboard does, so it’s faster to animate one element only.
• The height of picker_view is the height of the toolbar (43px) + the height of the picker (208px). How do I know this? I just used a ruler

The combobox interface looks like this:

Creating the picker animation

We also need to create 2 animations: slide_in and slide_out. We will animate the bottom property of the picker_view. We will need to start with the picker_view off the screen, so we will build it with:

 bottom:-251

instead of 0 as it was initially.

var slide_in =  Titanium.UI.createAnimation({bottom:0});
var slide_out =  Titanium.UI.createAnimation({bottom:-251});

The logic behind the animations is this:

• The user focuses the textField – the keyboard appears ( it’s done by the OS , no worries here) and if the picker_view is visible we need to hide it.
• The user clicks the rightButton – we need to hide the keyboard and show the picker_view.

Here is the code:

my_combo.addEventListener('focus', function() {
	picker_view.animate(slide_out);
});
 
drop_button.addEventListener('click',function() {
	picker_view.animate(slide_in);
	my_combo.blur();
});
 
cancel.addEventListener('click',function() {
	picker_view.animate(slide_out);
});

I also added the click event on the cancel button to hide the picker_view.

Filling the textField with the picker’s value

The only thing we have left is to actually put the value of the picker in the my_combo textField when the user clicks the done button and hide the picker_view.

done.addEventListener('click',function() {
	my_combo.value =  picker.getSelectedRow(0).title;
	picker_view.animate(slide_out);
});

The getSelectedRow method of the picker is returning the selected row, and we use its title. The getSelectedRow argument is the index of the columns in the picker, and since we have only one, this is 0.

Download the project

The Resource folder of the project can be downloaded from here.

Everything is MIT licensed, but as usual, spread the word

We have an update

@CJ_Reed used this tutorial “to produce multiple selection type data entry in a single window.”
Here is how it looks like:

You can take a look at he’s code here.
Great work!

Check the Spanish version of this post:
Haciendo una lista de opciones desplegables en Titanium Appcelerator – Código y Vídeo

In this post we will try to show you how to make a countdown timer using Titanium Appcelerator for Iphone or Android applications.

First we will create an OOP countDown object that can be used independently in the background of the application and then we will connect it with some interface elements.

The countDown object

To have functional a countdown timer we’ll need to declare some properties and some methods.

As properties we will set:

time:{ m : minutes, s : seconds },
total_seconds : m*60+s

I think this is pretty clear, time is an object with minutes and seconds and total_seconds contains the number of seconds until we reach 00:00.

We will need to set methods that will allow us to:

• set a time to count from
• stop the timer
• start it.

We also ned to set some callback functions that will be executed on each tick of the timer   – fn_tick – and one that will execute when the timer reaches 00:00 named fn_end.

We won’t make a callback for start because we know when this occurs we can trigger it by ourselves.

The countDown timer will look like this:

var my_timer = new countDown( minutes, seconds, fn_tick, fn_complete);

on this we will be able to apply

my_timer.set( minutes, seconds );
my_timer.start();
my_tmer.stop();

Below is the code that defines the countDown (pretty simple).

var countDown =  function( m , s, fn_tick, fn_end  ) {
	return {
		total_sec:m*60+s,
		timer:this.timer,
		set: function(m,s) {
			this.total_sec = parseInt(m)*60+parseInt(s);
			this.time = {m:m,s:s};
			return this;
		},
		start: function() {
			var self = this;
			this.timer = setInterval( function() {
				if (self.total_sec) {
					self.total_sec--;
					self.time = { m : parseInt(self.total_sec/60), s: (self.total_sec%60) };
					fn_tick();
				}
				else {
					self.stop();
					fn_end();
				}
				}, 1000 );
			return this;
		},
		stop: function() {
			clearInterval(this.timer)
			this.time = {m:0,s:0};
			this.total_sec = 0;
			return this;
		}
	}
}

And now to use it in our code we will do something like this:

var my_timer = new countDown(1 , 5 ,
	function()	{
		//something here...
	},
	function() {
		// something here...
	}
);
 
my_timer.start();

Ok, the above example is useless, we will need to display the current time on each tick of the countdown times (so on each second) and at the end we’ll have to alert the user when we reached 00:00.

We will also need some interface elements to access the countdown methods and to display the current time.

For this we will create a label named display_lbl, that will show the time and also 3 buttons : set_btn , start_btn and stop_btn.

Creating the code is pretty simple so I won’t put the code here but you will be able to take a look at it downloading the countdown project.

What is most important is to connect the interface with the countdown timer.

So we create the timer and set the fn_tick and fn_end functions

var my_timer = new countDown(5,30, 
		function() {
			display_lbl.text = my_timer.time.m+" : "+my_timer.time.s;
		},
		function() {
			alert("The time is up!");
		}
	);

And this is how we connect the buttons with my_timer

 
set_btn.addEventListener('click',function(){
	display_lbl.text = "5 : 30";
	my_timer.set(5,30);
});
 
stop_btn.addEventListener('click',function(){
	my_timer.stop();
});
 
start_btn.addEventListener('click',function(){
	my_timer.start();
});

As you see we also set the label’s text to the initial value when we set the timer because otherwise we’ll loose the first second. We do this here to keep the timer object clean of any external interaction so we can use it even without an interface.

This is how the final project looks like

Please keep in mind that this is just a simple example and we don’t have a control mechanism to detect when the user stopped the timer or it reached by itself 00:00 – but you can add it as an exercise

You can download the Resources folder of the project from here.

Everything is MIT licensed and you can use it in any application you want to, but spreading the word would be nice.

Check the Spanish version of this post:
Crear un temporizador regresivo con Titanium Appcelerator

Google came with a new idea in their list of web toys. A font directory that allows you as a web developer to include some “fancy” fonts in your pages without struggle.

What is Google Fonts Directory all about?

All the fonts in the Google Font Directory are licensed under open source licenses that let you use them on any website, from a private blog to a big commercial site. The idea seems to be good and comes to complete the Google AJAX Libraries API.

For now there are only a few fonts available but in time I think the list will grow.

There are two ways to use this on your site

The first one is simple and only requires a css file retrieved from Google’s servers like below:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" 
          href="http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Tangerine">
 
    <style>
      body {
        font-family: 'Tangerine';
        font-size: 48px;
      }
    </style>

You need to specify the family of the font and if it contains spaces you need to replace this with a “+” (plus character) sign

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" 
          href="http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Droid+Sans">

You can load multiple fonts in a single call. This will decrease the loading time because you use only one http request. The multiple fonts will be separated by a “|” ( pipe character ) sign.

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" 
          href="http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Tangerine|Inconsolata|Droid+Sans">

Normaly the fonts are loaded using the regular version but you have more control over the loaded font using some selectors for the style and weight, using a “:” ( colon character ) sign, and the values if more than one separated by a “,” ( comma )

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" 
          href="http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Tangerine:bold,bolditalic">

The style and weight of the font can be specified using a fullname, an abbreviation or a numeric value ( for weight )

bold:b
bold:700
italic:i
bolditalic:bi

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" 
          href="http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Cantarell:i|Droid+Serif:700">

Take into account that not all the fonts have the styles you might need so first of all verify in the font directory if it does.

The second option

The second option to load the fonts is to use the webloader (Javascript) that Google offer for this. This script can be called directly ( which is faster) or using their AJAX API functions. The main advantage of this method is that you can load fonts provided by TypeKit and Google or from any other font provider at the same time from the same library.

WebFont.load({
 
    google: {
      families: [ 'Tangerine', 'Cantarell' ]
    },
 
    typekit: 'myKitId',
 
    custom: { 
       families: ['OneFont', 'AnotherFont'],
       urls: [ 'http://myotherwebfontprovider.com/stylesheet1.css',
       'http://yetanotherwebfontprovider.com/stylesheet2.css' ] 
   }
});

The disadvantage of this method is the increased loading time comparing to the simple method.

Other things to consider

Loading external fonts is slow, at least the first time, until the font is cached on the visitor’s computer. Don’t overuse it.

You need to specify a fallback version for the font in case the browser is not supported. Here the browser uses a serif font in case it’s not able to load the “Tangerine” one.

  body {
        font-family: 'Tangerine', serif;
        font-size: 48px;
      }

The crossbrowsing issue

Each browser behaves in a different way, of course IE being the worse. To make a consistent behaviour across all the supported browsers you should use the webloader. This gives you the chance to display the styled elements with an initial font until the requested font file is loaded, and when this occurs to change it.

    .wf-inactive p { // Show paragraphs in serif font until fonts have loaded.
    font-family: serif
  }
  .wf-active p { // Show paragraphs in Tangerine when the fonts have loaded.
    font-family: 'Tangerine', serif
  }

If the number of fonts will increase then Google Fonts Directory will be a good alternative compared to other webfonts providers that offer this as a paid service. But you still can have fun with it, I’m sure google will continue to improve this service.

Check the demo

A demo page can be seen here. Interesting to see how IE behaves.

More resources

Google Font Directory
Google Fonts Directory API

and of course

Typekit

Check the Spanish version of this post:
Tutorial de Fuentes de Google

Ingredients: sprites, unorderdered lists, Mootools knowledge.
Cooking time: 1 hr
Result:
Can be seen on our website – Rborn Web development – mouse-over the top menu.

Preparation of the Mootools glowing menu

The menu is a list containing an A tag for each menu item. We are using sprites and text-indent:-5000px for accessibility purposes. The trick is that we use the image positioned top for LI and bottom for A HREF

Step 1: cook the HTML code

<ul id="mainnav">
<li><a href="/">home</a></li>
<li><a href="#">products</a></li>
<li><a href="#">portfolio</a></li>
<li><a href="/blog/">news</a></li>
<li><a href="#">contact</a></li>
</ul>

Step 2: add the CSS code

li.home {background:url("../img/home.png") top left;}
li.home a {width:29px;background:url("../img/home.png") bottom left;}

This is the positioning of the background image I was talking about earlier.
Now the magic of the glowing is made with few lines of code using MooTools.

Step 3: spice with MooTools code

$('mainnav').getElements('li a').each( function(item){
    if ( !item.hasClass('clicked') ) {
        item.setStyle('opacity',0.01).addEvent('mouseenter', function() {        
this.fade(1)}).addEvent('mouseleave',function(){this.fade(0.01)});
}
})

The code is triggered either on domready event, or put inside a script tag just before the body ends so have the dom loaded and ready to be accessed by javascript.

Basically all we are doing is to get all the A tags inside the menu, set the opacity to 0.01 because if you set it to 0 MooTools will add display:none to the style and the links won’t be visible anymore.

Further we play with the fade method to increase the opacity to 1 or decrease back to 0.01 on the mouseenter and mouseleave event.

We also check if the menu is active or not – we are on the menu page or not –  verifying if the item has a class ‘clicked’, set by the backend. If the item contains this class we simply leave it alone and the item is ‘on’ all the time.

That’s it. Let me know your thoughts.

Check the Spanish version of this post:
Cómo hacer un menú brillante con MooTools en 3 pasos

In this post I will show how to create a tooltip to those that are using Titanium to develop their iPhone apps.
Sometimes when we set a button with an icon – lets say in navbar – a simple icon is not enough to make the user understand what the button is supposed to do.

For example this one:

What would the rightNavButton do ? The application is an ebook reader – if this helps, but I’m sure it will not….

What about this:

Now you know that by hitting this button you can continue your reading – in case something took you out from the chapter, like  changing a setting, or answering the phone or whatever…

So let’s start.

The tooltip is a simple view with the tip image set as background:

var lasttipView =  Titanium.UI.createView({
width:205,
height:57,
backgroundImage:"img/bubble.png",
top:0,
right:3
});

The “Continue reading” is a simple label added to this view

var lasttipLabel =  Titanium.UI.createLabel({
text:'Continue reading',
color:'#fff',
width:205,
height:34,
top:16,
font:{
fontFamily:'Helvetica Neue',
fontSize:13,
fontWeight:'bold'
},
textAlign:'center'
});
 
lasttipView.add(lasttipLabel);

and the index window contains the tip view

index_win.add(lasttipView);

I supposed we already have the index_win created.

Now when we open the index_win the tooltip will be there and the user will know what the rightNavButton does. But if the tooltip stays there it becomes annoying so we need to find a way to hide it. I choose to hide it when the user clicks the button by using a smooth fadeout.

The code below creates an animation and attaches it to the click event.

var anim_out = Titanium.UI.createAnimation();
anim_out.opacity=0;
anim_out.duration = 250;
});
 
last_read =  Titanium.UI.createButton({
image:"img/tag1.png"
});
 
 
last_read.addEventListener('click', function() {
lasttipView.animate(anim_out);
});
 
index_win.setRightNavButton( last_read );

Ok, here is the button code too but for simplicity I removed some parts that actually display the chapter and trigger other functions.

That’s all. Pretty simple, isn’t it ?

PS. You can use the bubble image in your apps if you want, only just let me know – and if you are curious about the app here it is:
Youth, by Isaac Asimov iPhone ebook.

Check the Spanish version of this post:
Crear una ingeniosa herramienta de notificación en Titanium

In this post  I will try to explain how to create custom rows for TableViews using Titanium Mobile.

If you don’t know what Titanium is about,  take a look here. I suppose you already know how to setup and start a Titanium project so I’ll show only how to create a custom row.

By default a TableView will let you create a row that can have: the left image, the title and the row type decorator set. The next code is an example of the standard data that needs to be passed to a TableView.

var RegData = [
 
{ leftImage:'es.png', title:"Spain", hasChild:true },
{ leftImage:'gb.png', title:"United Kingdom", hasChild:true },
{ leftImage:'us.png', title:"United States", hasChild:true },
{ leftImage:'fr.png', title:"France", hasChild:true }
];
 
var TheTable = Titanium.UI.createTableView({
data:RegData
});

And the result is this:

Ok, we would like to add more data to a row, maybe something like this:

This will require to build the row “by hand”. So we need to add a 2 imageViews, the flag and the trend, and  labelViews for the country and the percent . We also need to change the data array of course.

var CustomData = [
{ flag:'es.png', country:"Spain", trend:'up.png', percent:'28%' ,hasChild:true },
{ flag:'gb.png', country:"United Kingdom", trend:'down.png', percent:'-3%', hasChild:true },
{ flag:'us.png', country:"United States", trend:'up.png', percent:'8%', hasChild:true },
{ flag:'fr.png', country:"France", trend:'down.png', percent:'-40%', hasChild:true }
];

We create a data variable as an array that will hold the row objects generated.

var data=[];

then we walk through the CustomData array, create  a new row , the imageViews and labels and add them to the row.

for (var i = CustomData.length - 1; i >= 0; i--) {
var row = Titanium.UI.createTableViewRow();
 
var flag =  Titanium.UI.createImageView({
url:CustomData[i].flag,
width:32,
height:32,
left:4,
top:2
});
 
var country = Titanium.UI.createLabel({
text:CustomData[i].country,
font:{fontSize:16,fontWeight:'bold'},
width:'auto',
textAlign:'left',
top:2,
left:40,
height:16
});
 
var percent =  Titanium.UI.createLabel({
text:CustomData[i].percent,
font:{fontSize:12,fontWeight:'bold'},
width:'auto',
textAlign:'left',
bottom:0,
left:60,
height:12
});
 
var trend =  Titanium.UI.createImageView({
url:CustomData[i].trend,
width:16,
height:16,
right:10
});
 
row.add(flag);
row.add(country);
row.add(percent);
row.add(trend);
row.hasChild=CustomData[i].hasChild;
 
row.className = 'coutry_row';
 
data.push(row);
};

As you see we also add a className to the row to improve the rendering performance, as the iPhone will reuse the row template with every new data when rendering the table.

The obtained result is this:

You can download the complete Titanium project from here. You will have to create a new project in Titanium and replace the resource folder with the one in the archive.

Let me know your thoughts.

Check the Spanish version of this post:
Como crear filas personalizadas para TableViews usando Titanium Móvil

Webiconset.com offers for download three small sets of  icons (10 icons per set ) for both personal and commercial use. The Icons are high quality and come in 4 sizes –  128, 64, 48 and 32 pixels, in png format.

Aplication Icon Set

contains: Register, Settings, Users, Database, Login, Chat, Add, Delete, Edit, Invoice.

Cute Blogging Icon

Set has the next icons : Design, Download, Freelance, Part-time, Hire Me, Not Available, About Me, Services, My Blog, Contact.

while the last set

Mobile Icons Set

includes Phone Call, Photos, Messages, Calculator, Wireless, Calendar, Settings, Contacts, Notes, Map.