The ability to create user-friendly layouts with rich, intuitive controls is an important factor in successful app design. With mobile apps and their minimal screen real estate, this becomes even more important. Titanium leverages a huge amount of native controls found in both the iPhone/iPod Touch and Android platforms, allowing the developer to create apps just as rich in functionality as those created by native language developers.

How does this compare to the mobile web? When it comes to HTML/CSS only mobile apps, savvy users can definitely tell the difference in comparison to a platform like Titanium, which allows you to use platform-specific conventions and access your iPhone or Android device's latest and greatest features. An application written in Titanium feels and operates like a native app since essentially all of the UI components are native. This means crisp, responsive UI components utilizing the full capabilities and power of your device.

Most other books at this point would start explaining the fundamental principles of Titanium and maybe give you a rundown on the architecture and expand on the required syntax.

Yawn...

We're not going to do that. Instead, we will be jumping straight into the fun stuff, building your user interface and making a real-world app! In this chapter, you'll learn:

You can pick and choose any recipe from the chapter if you want since each one is a self-contained example that will explain a specific component or process. Alternatively, you can follow each chapter from beginning to end to put together a real-world app for calculating loan repayments which we will call LoanCalc from here on in.