I remembered Minjun Wang once posted an article introducing the Rho mobile, which is an HTML5 application development platform built to meet the needs of the next generation of business mobility using Ruby and Rails. Well, today I’m going to introduce another tool to develop multi-platform mobile applications – Titanium, based on Javascript.

Unlike Phone Gap and Rho mobile which both rely heavily on HTML to render the visual display across different platforms, Titanium uses a unified Javascript interface to build up the UI (in fact, the UI framework of Titanium itself is also written in Javascript). Under the hook, the Javascript source code will get deployed to the simulator/mobile device where it is interpreted.

This indicates that when you run an application developed by Titanium, you are not running the one which are comprised of HTML pages and rendered by the web browser control with not-so-good performance; it is a real native application which fits well in every native ecosystem it supports. And I think this is the biggest advantage of Titanium over other multi-platform solutions.

Just as a coin has two sides, below comes the downsides of Titanium from my own perspective and experience: Being a mobile multi-platform solution, it can hardly support any other platform except Android, iOS and limited BlackBerry. However, this might not be a big issue since now most of the mobile application are just targeted towards iOS and Android. The second is, it is not so easy to debug the Titanium applications. Well, the reason for this seems obvious: Javascript is a dynamic language, and debugging is a pain for every dynamic language. The third is it seems the tool has some problems supporting the Android platform: sometimes, an application which runs well under iOS crashes under Android.

To sum up, if you are to build up a multi-platform mobile application with a single code base but still requires native application’s performance, I would strongly recommend you take a look at Titanium.

In B.E Aerospace project, we have to deal with lots of complicated SmartView Reports (SmartView is a plugin on Excel for Hyperion which is a BI suite of Oracle). And it would be a great advantage if you are familiar with the various Excel functions and how to make good use of them. Now I am just going to share a small tip on this: relative and absolute references in formulas. It will save you a lot of time and make you do “copy and paste” wisely, if you can master the method which I will introduce you bellow.

             Let’s start with bringing in the concept of “Cell Reference”. Well, you might have already known that: we are able to reference other cells in Excel formulas, E.g. in the screenshot below, cell A3 is to sum A1 and A2 and we use the formula “=A1 + A2”. Here the “A1” and “A2” are both examples of cell reference.

So what are the relative and absolute references? Absolute references have a “$” character before the row portion of the reference or/and the column portion of the reference while relative references do not use that. In the simple example above, both of the “A1” and “A2” are relative references. The “$” character indicates that it should not increment the row or/and column references as you copy a formula from one cell to another.

Well, word descriptions might be dull and hard to understand. Let’s dive into some live examples:

Let’s continue the simple example above but this time, we also fill B1 and B2 with values and then we copy the formula “=A1+A2” from A3 to B3. You must have figured out that B3 will be filled with the formula “=B1+B2” as here we use relative references and thus the column reference gets incremented, as shown in the screenshot below:

What will happen if we modified the formula in A3 to “=$A1+$A2” and then again copy it to B3? Since now we are using the absolute references to both A1 and A2, B3 will still hold the value of 300 which is the addition of A1 and A2 but not B1 and B2. The screenshot below will make this clearer:

You can also try modifying A3 to “=$A1+$A2” or “=A$1+A$2” to experience the difference. Well, that’s all for this sharing. Anyway, have fun!