Getting started with Titanium development for Android and Iphone

This is the third post in our mobile app development series. ( You may want to read Phonegap and Android with Java.)

Like last time we will build an App which allows calculating the tax payable, per the rules here. We will use Titanium Mobile

Installing Titanium

Download and install the fairly small Titanium from their sites. Once you download and start it, it will download and install more components. You can then create a new project from their UI.

Layout the Layout

You can add UI widgets and lay them out using Javascript. You need to use Titanium’s API, to create the UI.

Titanium execution starts in app.js. We will modify this file to add the layout code.

You can add a label like this

Titanium.UI.createLabel({
	color:'#999',
	text:label_text,
	font:{fontSize:20,fontFamily:'Helvetica Neue'},
	textAlign:'left',
	width: 'auto',
	height: 'auto',
	top: 5
});

Similarly you can create a Button and TextInput as

Titanium.UI.createTextField(
{
....
}
);

Titanium.UI.createButton({
	...[Options]
})

Create a window as Titanium.UI.createWindow({}). and add these Items to it via window.add. Your widgets have been added to the UI, and should show up, in the simulator. Here is what mine looks like. You can get the code for the layout at here.

Code the code

We now need to add the code to handle button clicks, calculate the tax, and update the UI with the tax. Since our code for this is going to be Javascript, we can easily reuse the tax calculation parts from our Phonegap app.

function getTax(taxableIncome){
    var taxOnThisSlab;
    if (taxableIncome < 160000) {
        return 0;
    }
 ///More code to calculate the tax
//....

}


function calculateTax(income, investment, infra_investment, housing_interest, medical_premium){
	investment = Math.max(0, Math.min(investment, 100000));
	 ///More code to calculate the tax
	//....

}

Now we add a EventListener to the Button we added and this is used to calculate the tax and update the Label for showing the text.

calculateTaxBut.addEventListener("click", function(){
	var income = income_f.value;
	var investment = investment_f.value;
	//More code to get the values and update the tax area.
	//.....
	var tax = calculateTax(income, investment, infra_investment, housing_interest, medical_premium);
	calculated_tax.text = ""+tax;

});

And we are done

Overall, the experience with Titanium was OK. The Titanium developer UI could have been better, the UI is Unintuitive. Building for Android is very slow. Lunch button in their developer UI seems to stop working at random intervals. However the promise of building native apps is very alluring, and I would be working more with Titanium.

Resources

1. Finished code on Github
2. [Tutorial: Building the same app with Obj-c] - Todo
3. Tutorial: Building the same app with Phonegap
4. Tutorial: Building the same app with Java:Android
5. Code: Phonegap app on Github
6. Code: Java app on Github
7. Code: Obj-C app on Github

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