Titanium

Release Candidate for Titanium Mobile 1.5.0

The long anticipated Titanium Mobile 1.5.0’s general availability (GA) release is getting close. We’re anticipating rolling out the GA release early next week. On Monday we had an internal release candidate, found a few issues, and are now ready to make Titanium Mobile 1.5.0 Release Candidate 2 available for those of you who want to preview it. We are currently working on more API documentation, Programming Guides, and other Goodies. You’ll find download information at the end of the post.

Few Important Items

Before we jump into some of the fun stuff, we want to mention that there is one breaking change on Android. Ti.UI.Android.createMenu and Ti.UI.Android.Menu have been removed. The are four menu examples in KitchenSink. map_view.js has been refactored to use the new menu API. There is also android_menu_1, android_menu_2, and android_menu_3.

Also, if you want to take advantage of specifying your Android configuration in your tiapp.xml you’ll need the soon to be released Developer 1.2.2 update.

Finally, the new 2.3 emulators have a serious issue with WebViews and the Javascript to Java Bridge. See Issue 12987 in the Android bug database for more information. Short story, until Google addresses this issue and pushes a patch we recommend using the same emulators for testing as you were before if you use a WebView

What’s New

Firstly, in 1.5.0 we’ve addressed over 500 issues on iOS and Android. On both platforms we’ve added or improved:

  • Memory Usage and Performance
  • Javascript Stylesheets (JSS)
  • Localization
  • Multiple Density Images
  • Drillbit – Platform Unit Tests
  • Clipboard
  • Simple Services
  • Module Development Kit

This is a big Android feature release and we’ve only begun to scrape the surface of what’s possible:

  • Exposing several Android native classes: Activity, Service, Intent, PendingIntent, Menu, and MenuItem.
  • Javascript based Activities and simple Services
  • Extensive support for providing resources for the different screens and densities
  • Pickers
  • Calendar
  • Contacts (Read-only)
  • Remote Image Cache when using ImageView
  • and many other features

We’ve also added iOS features as well:

  • Drawing performance improvements, especially in TableView
  • Coverflow Views
  • Improved background and local notification support

More Information will be made available over the coming weeks.

Download and Installation

Download Links for Titanium Mobile 1.5.0 RC2

OSX (iOS/Android): mobilesdk-1.5.0.RC2-osx.zip
Win32 (Android): mobilesdk-1.5.0.RC2-win32.zip
Linux(Android): mobilesdk-1.5.0.RC2-linux.zip

To install, you’ll want to download the appropriate distribution above and then extract into your Titanium directory.

For example, on OSX, your Titanium directory will be under either /Library/Application Support/Titanium or~/Library/Appcelerator Support/Titanium..

On Linux ~/.titanium.

On Windows Vista/7 C:ProgramDataTitanium and on Windows XP C:Documents and SettingsAll UsersApplication DataTitanium

Once you locate your Titanium directory, extract the zip file into this directory. The zip file will expand the contents and create/overlay some new directories for 1.5.0.

NOTE for OSX users who use Safari to download : Safari by default will auto uncompress your downloads, how handy. However, if you have a directory named mobilesdk, your extracted directory will be renamed. On OSX, I suggest you use curl and do it the old fashion way. In the terminal, go to your Titanium directory and then run the following commands:

> curl -L https://builds.appcelerator.com.s3.amazonaws.com/RC/mobilesdk-1.5.0.RC2-osx.zip >mobilesdk-1.5.0-osx.zip
> unzip -o mobilesdk-1.5.0-osx.zip

Now, you’ll need to restart Titanium Developer to pick up the new release. Once restarted, remember to change your application SDK version and then click the ‘Save’ button.

You should now be able to test with the latest release.