smorgasbork

If you're looking for a way to easily enable your client software to send and receive low latency messages with a server or other clients, BrightContext's service may be just the thing you're looking for.

BrightContext provides you a shared message queue to which clients can submit messages and subscribe to receive all messages sent to the queue.

As of version 1.6.0, the BrightContext Javascript API supports Titanium Mobile out of the box, making it very easy to integrate into your application. All you need is the bcc library and the Ti websocket client library.

A question that is frequently posed on the Titanium Q&A forum is how to manipulate TabGroups on android. On iOS, Titanium allows you to add new tabs to your TabGroup. You can even have multiple TabGroups (so for example, your app could branch off into multiple windows, each with its own TabGroup.

But on android, you can only have one TabGroup active at a time, and you can't alter the tabs in the group once it's created. In theory, you can create a new one and close the previous one to effectively change the tabs in a TabGroup.

But executing this is easier said than done.

You'll notice that it has been over 6 weeks since my last installment. There's a reason for that. Trying to build a seemingly simple app like a countdown timer has proven to be insidiously difficult.

Imagine building a countdown timer as a desktop app or in a web page. It would be extremely simple to do. You periodically update the time displayed on screen, and you check to see if the timer has hit zero. When it hits zero, you play back a sound. Easy, right?

In a mobile app, however, the rules are very different. Your app may not be in the foreground when the timer hits zero. Your app may not even be running when the timer hits zero. The device may not even be powered on when the timer hits zero. You have to deal with all these scenarios. And to make matters worse, if you're building a cross-platform Titanium Mobile app, you have to deal with the nuances of background processing, notifications, and alarms on both iOS and Android.

We've got some of the basics of our app working, but it looks so drab. I'm much more motivated to work on an app when it looks good early on in the development cycle. So let's spend this next development push working on the look and feel of the app.

I am an avid griller, and I've always wanted an app to help me cook up a great New York Strip steak or other delicious dishes on the grill. There are a couple of things I need all the time:

• a versatile timer
• cooking temperature guide

I have seen timers on the markets, but none do quite what I want. And for some reason, I can never remember the safe cooking temperatures for poultry, pork, beef, etc. So if I could build one app that has all of this at my fingertips, I'd get a lot of use out of it. So I saw this as a good opportunity to build an app in tutorial form so everyone can see the kinds of steps you take to build a Titanium Mobile app.