Advanced  Titanium  Development  for  Android  

Don  Thorp  &  Marshall  Culpepper    

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Android Tooling

• Android Debug Bridge (adb) • DDMS (Dalvick Debug Monitor Server) • “android” • “hierarchyviewer” • “traceview”

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Android Debug Bridge (adb)

•  the swiss army knife of Android, tons of commands, works with emulator & device • push / pull: upload / download files •  install / uninstall applications •  shell: full /bin/sh system access •  logcat: app / device logging

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DDMS

• Graphical frontend to adb, and other android SDK tools • App process control • Colored Logcat output • Mock Geo / Phone call / etc control • Minimal memory / cpu profiling

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Other Android SDK Tools

•  “android” – manage virtual devices (emulators w/ versions, SDcard

size, etc) – SDK updates, extras

•  “hierarchyviewer”: – Layout / UI debugging tool

•  “traceview” – Visual call hierarchy / CPU profiling

• Much more, See the official Android docs (links at the end)

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Android Concepts •  Application – Collection of one or more Activities • Selected by OS w/ Intent filters

– SDK version compatibility (API Level)

•  Intent

– Fully serializable data, used between Activities – Various fields/options • Action (VIEW, EDIT, SEND, etc), Data (URI) • Category (CATEGORY_LAUNCHER etc) • Mime type (e.g. vnd.android.cursor.item/phone) • Class name (e.g. com.mycompany.Activity) • Extra’s - Custom key/value pairs

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Android Concepts

• Activity –  Task Stack • Inter-app + screen navigation

–  App entry point –  Handle system+custom intents • Can return values to other activities

• Others –  Service –  Notifications, PendingIntent

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App/Activity Life Cycle

• User launches app – Intent is fired to app

with: • category: CATEGORY_LAUNCHER • action: MAIN

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How do I do that with Ti?

•  Custom JS Activities – JS Activities can be simple (launched via URL) or complex

(launched via intent filter from the system) – Configured via tiapp.xml

•  Everything else (mostly) follows a 1:1 mapping w/ official Android API – All constants / create* methods live in Ti.Android – i.e. Ti.Android.createIntent – Access current activity with Ti.Android.currentActivity – Activity.startActivityForResult supports a function

callback for convenience

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Resources

• Use Android density / orientation res specifiers in Resources/android/images • Arbitrary android native resources can live

in project’s platform/android

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tiapp.xml examples

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JS Examples

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Javascript Engines

• Rhino –  Our current Javascript Engine –  Java based which allows it to work on devices

without NDK support

• V8 –  Used in Chrome, Chromium, NodeJS, and more –  C++ based requires NDK support –  Performance 2X minimum, in many cases 10-15x

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Titanium+Android Demos

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Links!

• Android Tools: http://developer.android.com/guide/developing/tools/index.html •  Ti.Android module:

http://developer.appcelerator.com/apidoc/mobile/latest/Titanium.Android-module •  Services in Titanium:

http://developer.appcelerator.com/doc/mobile/android-simple-services