My goodness - it's been a little over 12 months since my last blog post and I guess you're wondering what's going on.

Well, I started dating around October 2008 after a divorce, concentrated efforts in a new start-up, a few trips to Bali and a few trips to South Africa, met a new sweetheart who I then married, moved house to a unit with an outlook to the water and now in the process of another trip to South Africa. Oh and also writing an iPhone app for Buy1GIVE1 as well.

And the iPhone app development has been interesting to say the least. Learning Objective-C for iPhone Dev was looking to be quite a steep learning when considering the last 'coding' I've really done in ernest was decades ago and that was assembly for the Z80 processor - a lot has changed since back in those dark old days :)

I stumbled across a new dev tool called Titanium Mobile which essentially allows you to build native iPhone apps using Javascript, HTML and CSS. That's a pretty bold claim and certainly worthy of investigation since it's likely to save a pile of time if you've got rudimentary knowledge of web design. So I thought I'd give it a go and put Titanium through it's paces. Check out Titanium's overview below.

Note: I'm pretty crap at Javascript too however let's see how I go, using Titanium Mobile's sample programs as a guide.

The BuyGIVE1 app is being done to promote their charity system that vastly promotes a business' product through a giving cause - think of that as 'if I wanted to buy a product and there's 2 companies and one of them was actually doing some greater good then the average person would choose the greater good. And therefore that company significantly increases their bottom line and revenue.' Wonderful if you ask me.

So the app needs to provide some benefit to the iPhone owner as well as promote Buy1GIVE1 and hopefully generate some further giving to their causes. My design starts off with the mindset of an RSS feed, ways to generate giving and some explanation of who and what Buy1GIVE1 are.

Obviously the first learning curve was understanding the Titanium API and various mechanisms for displaying stuff in the iPhone Simulator (you need to download and install the iPhone SDK too) and this was easier to do by going through the Help site since the current level of documentation is still a little poor and needs work.

Here's what I've managed to do in a few weeks:

I've really now hit the limit of my limited Javascript knowledge and have to now buckle down and wade through a few 'Learn Javascript For Dummies' books. I've been able to get an RSS list of news items to display in a table view however stripping the actual website article of just the content text and images so as to display in an iPhone friendly format is proving quite a challenging task. So much HTML rubbish to prune out requires a bit more code knowledge than I possess currently - groan.

Titanium is currently at v0.8 beta with an update coming in a few weeks which should improve speed, squash some bugs and some other refinements. I'm looking to at least get the first iteration of 'The App That Gives' into the App Store in the next few weeks as well - just to start the giving going and get some feedback.

Look out for the next post on a brand new App Store app feedback and beta test site that's just launched and that's a free site too!