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The day 4 comes very late because it was a very busy period so I had no time to continue the tutorials.
Ok, so we should treat in this tutorial the media part of Appcelerator. This includes images – display and capture them with the camera and how to play movie and sounds.

Display images with Appcelerator

To display an image we use the ImageView. The image view has some simple arguments, like any view in the Titanium framework. I won’t repeat them except for the important one. Obviously the source if the image is the one we are interested in set by the image argument, and accepts local or remote files.

In “day 3″ we will learn how to make our application communicate with a webserver. There are 2 ways we can do this: one is to use a webview and point it to a real web page or using the HttpClient that Appcelerator provides us.

The WebView

What is WebView? A WebView is nothing more than a chromeless browser or, if you want, a “naked” browser (it misses the interface we’re used to) that allows us to open remote or local webpages and display it in our apps.

You can use the webview for many purposes starting from displaying some nice html/css formatted text to building your own in-app browser. One thing you must NOT forget is that the webview it’s very expensive for the device (in terms of CPU load and memory usage) so try to use it only when it’s really really needed.

The webview is created using the function Titanium.UI.createWebView. Some things to specify about it would be that you have to choose between managing the touch events as a Titanium entity, or let the webpage do this. You cannot have both in the same time.

Two events that deserve more attention are beforeLoad and load that can be used to show and hide a “loading…” screen from the moment you try to load a remote page until the webpage is fully loaded.

Welcome to day 2 with Titanium – Tables and pickers. A short reminder of what we’ve done till now:

• Introduction
• Day 1 – Windows, Views, navigation and Tabs.

Believe it or not, the table is the most used UI element in the iPhone SDK. If you play a little with the applications that come with your “iDevice” you will see that almost all the native apps have tables. Sometimes they are so well designed and the appearance so changed that you don’t even think of them as tables. But in time, while you will learn more, you will be able to spot it and a lot of ideas will come to you . Also I think that that the pickers are some sort of “undercover tables” so that’s why I’ll present both in the same tutorial.

Today is going to be the first day of the Titanium tutorial for beginners and a pretty long post.
Before we begin here is the recap of what we have written until now (and updated what will come): Seven days with Titanium – day 0 – introduction

As specified in the Introduction post I will try in this lesson to say some things about navigation, windows, views and tabs – the basics of the interface.

What is all about?

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 Appcelerator 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.

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.

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.

Have you ever tried to understand how IE8 behaves when searching? As a non-IE user I am used to going to the top right box, type a word and receive instantly the page with the search results. I work mostly with Mozilla and sometimes with Opera and Chrome (when I’m in a hurry and I need a page to load fast, I admit). So for me, as a user, the entire search process is transparent. I don’t even pay much attention to what search engine each of them uses. I know they are going to return some results and I’m always in a hurry.

It’s Friday, I was thinking to have a little fun and offer you this brand new multibrowser addon to create pixel-perfect layouts based on a horizontal grid.

We will also think about a vertical one, or mixing vertical and horizontal grids to bring some happiness into designers’ world

Suggestions and improvements are welcome and much appreciated.

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.