TITANIUM DEVELOPER

If you've ever tried to create a PDF document from within a Titanium application, you'll appreciate the difficulty of the task at hand, and the distinct lack of options that exist.

A quick search of the Appcelerator Open Mobile Marketplace for the term 'pdf' presents four modules - three for rendering PDF documents and only one for generation. The module that does deal with PDF creation seems to lack image insertion (the user is only permitted to set the background image), text placement and format. If you wish to present your data in a simple table of unformatted text, great, otherwise you're a bit stuck.

The Community Questions & Anwers forum is littered with fellow Titaniumites looking for PDF creation options, with little success. Most threads (like Thomas Schulze's) result in references to jsPDF, a JavaScript library that doesn't support image insertion and was updated back in July 2010.

Customised PDF creation, in app, for Titanium?
A solution is coming!

So that's it then? A couple of pretty poor options for creating PDF documents within our Titanium applications. I found this quite staggering, given the amount of support behind the development for one, and the options that exist in the Objective-C landscape. This got me thinking - surely there's a way to create PDFs that supports images, placement and better formatting...

... and low and behold there is. I've been working for some time now on adapting an existing JavaScript library so that it is compatible with Titanium. The library currently takes HTML & CSS and generates a PDF document out the back of it. It's not fully complete yet, but I am currently able to insert images, add text, change font-sizes, use page breaks, format margins, add spacing and control placement of all my document attributes. It's not perfect, and there are limitations on the syntax of the code you can use, but it's pretty damn good and it's a hundred times better than the options currently out there.

So what's next? Well it's currently not possible to use custom fonts (but you can reference a limited number of built in fonts), and you can't programatically define the location of images (I'm having to hardcode this in the library), but these are all issues I'm looking to iron out. In the meantime I plan to package the code up as a module and release it to the Marketplace with the promise that some of the limitations will be ironed out. Watch this space...

So, that's me back from Australia, the land down under. Capitalising on the experience I gained from various exciting projects, I've decided to launch this website and tell the world a little bit more about me and my work.

Australia wasn't all about the social experience. Don't get me wrong, I had the time of my life: I skydived, bungee jumped, scuba dived, and just generally partied. But I also met some really great people in the digital industry and I worked on some really great projects. For example, I met David Kennedy from DangerousPixels in Melbourne who introduced me to Jeff Bonnes, developer and entreprenuer. As a consequence I got to work on an Android app for the Melbourne Cricket Ground, providing the ground's latest news & tweets to users, as well as allowing users to find seats and get travel information. Most interesting of all was the integration with Facebook to 'check in' to facilities with the ground, and find other friends in the vacinity.

77777Very detailed app
Great app for people who are new to the MCG or are infrequent visitors.
Nice to have this available on Android now!- TZ

Next stop was Sydney where I hooked up with Richard Linstead from FiveCornerSquare, an up and coming digital agency specialising (like myself) in mobile and web applications. I'm currently developing the new site for the company, as well as working on a really interesting iPad application for a telecoms/energy reseller, both of which should be going live in the coming weeks.

Now I'm back in the UK I'm looking to expand on this experience and develop more great applications. I've already developed a small website for Lucinda Puddicombe and I'm getting my hands dirty with some jQuery work for Salesforce.com with Andrew Mowat from Cloud-dev. There's also talk of developing an app for helping people socialise, in colaboration with Matthew Lanham from Swanify and Andy Smiff, freelance web designer. So there is plenty to get excited about now I'm back!