TiShadow

This week I put together TiShadow which, inspired by Adobe Shadow, allows Titanium developers to write code snippets in a browser and render it on multiple devices over the air. It uses Titanium on the app side and a mix of technologies, including Node.js, on the server side.

I put together a screencast with a quick demo and walkthrough of the Titanium code, which featured on Appcelerator's Forging Titanium series as well as their blog.

In this blog we are going to create an animated "split apart view". The idea is much like when you tap on an application group on the iOS home screen and the screen appears to split apart revealing the apps in that group.

Summary

The implementation is quite simple. It should be clear that no view is actually going to split. The split effect can be achieved however as follows.

We will use two views, each with their background image set with the image of the window to be split apart - we shall call these the "doors" or leftView and rightView. We will also need to have the view that will be behind the doors when they open - insideView. The doors and insideView will be placed on top of the window that we want to be split apart - hostWin - when it is time for the effect. The impatient can skip straight to the example on github.

This being our first post I thought I'd like to discuss the power drill in our toolkit for mobile and tablet development - Appcelerator's Titanium.

So what is Titanium? In a nutshell it is a mobile development framework that lets you build native iOS and Android apps using Javascript on a (mostly) shared codebase.

This post is not intended to be a marketing spiel on behalf of Appcelerator. It is more about why we use Titanium and the difference it makes for our customers.