What is the right way to open titanium appcelerator windows?

Question

I am working on a Titanium Appcelerator iOS app that contains an initial Dashboard screen and 2 separate screens that can be accessed from the Dashboard.

I have set up my app to use a navigation controller and everything is controlled from a main.js file using custom event listeners. I do this so that I can separate the code for each screen into separate files.

The problem is that with each screen that loads, I have to open the window on the nav stack and then add all the elements to it. This is fine for one of the screens because it just contains a few views and labels. However, the other screen has a MapView and it takes 3 seconds or so to load after the user sees the screen open.

What is the right way to handle this? Is there a way to preload the window before opening but to keep my current architecture?

I asked this question in a much more confusing and specific way, here but I think that this general question is applicable to more people as the architecture style I am using is fairly common.

Answer 1

I think your approach is fairly typical...unfortunately I don't know of any way to preload the content of your window. You may be able to improve the user experience as the map view loads by including a static image of the map canvas (in the same way Apple's UI guidelines recommend that the Default.png be an image of the app itself's basic interface to give the impression that it's loading quickly). You can also add a loading spinner in the form of a Ti.UI.ActivityIndicator . Both of these can be added by default to the window, then hidden as you show the map on the map view's load event. I think they'd probably help make that 3 second wait seem less painful.

I noticed in your other post that you observed the map still took a long time to load even when you weren't actively getting the user's GPS location. While true, you might be able to save some time by getting the location immediately upon app launch, then passing it to your map window with the custom event you're using, so the map could then be initialized directly on the user's location, rather than a dummy location.

Answer 2

for the navigation controller i started using https://github.com/vuinguyen/NavController

it works very well for ios/android and the git code was straight forward and easy to follow. its an enhanced version of the one Kevin Whinnery put out quite some time ago. I have been using it in 3.0 without any specific complaints. I've added the ability to suppress native ios navigation headers but aside from that it dropped right in.

Answer 3

I don't think so using the exact same architecture. Upon initial load of the app, you could load all your views within one window, instead of using multiple windows. Then, modify the one that is currently being shown by altering the zIndexes