The following guest spot is from Trevor Cornwell, Founder and CEO at appbackr. You can follow him on Twitter at @trevorcornwell

Titanium makes it easy for developers to build mobile apps and publish them across platforms. It is a big step forward. appbackr is focused on motivating more developers to build across newly emerging platforms.

Encouraging distribution to other platforms is challenging because of a few basic reasons, starting with “Is it worth my time to port to any given new platform?” Because selling apps, like any content, is a matter of aggregating medium and long-tail users, we believe that porting to a new platform makes sense. Except that there are tedious sign-up processes, long contracts that may subsume distribution rights and unknown SDKs, which all create just enough friction to make the process eminently skippable.

And the problem exists on the other side: new platforms want great apps, but not necessarily sub-prime, chop-shop apps.

So how do great developers with the best new apps meet great, emerging platforms efficiently?

appbackr is providing a promotion to Titanium developers to help! We’ve made it possible for every app that you create to get scored for quality and relevance on a 1 to 10 scale. The best apps receive tools and a guarantee number of downloads based on the store’s needs and how well your app fits.

As part of this promotion, once you build your app on Titanium, you can see the score and your offer. With the announcement of Titanium’s support of Tizen, appbackr has scored every app and Titanium developers will be receiving a simple 3-step process for porting to Tizen and getting a minimum guarantee for your app.

You can also sign on to Xchange and track your installs on one dashboard and even consolidate payments so you don’t have to provide your bank account information to every new platform that asks for it.

Why Tizen? This is a chance to have your app, live, right from the start of a brand-new operating system built on HTML5 and part of the Linux Foundation. It has heavy support from Samsung, Intel and major carriers around the world.

And once your app is live in Tizen, we can give you additional offers like free translation into launch country languages, and even offers to port to additional HTML5 platforms that are relevant to your app.

You made a great decision building with Titanium. Your app is ready to go in Tizen. Now, submit it through Xchange and receive the financial incentives that your app deserves.

Today’s featured developer story comes from the guys at OpenRest. OpenRest was founded in 2010 with the intent of revolutionizing mobile online food ordering. With the help of Titanium, Danny Leshem and Yoav Amit have delivered over 300 restaurant apps. Read more about their story and how they’re leveraging Titanium.

Interview with Danny Leshem and Yoav Amit from OpenRest

Do you have an interesting story to tell about your development on Titanium? We would love to hear it. Drop us a line at community@appcelerator.com and tell us more.

It’s all about enterprise connectivity, performance and new platforms

We have kept ourselves pretty busy here at Appcelerator over the last couple of months. Today we are excited to announce a major release for both the Titanium and Cloud products: Titanium Studio and SDK 3.1 and Node.ACS GA.

Titanium 3.1

In the 3.1 release we focused on 3 key areas: performance optimization, APIs, and new platform support. Please see the release notes for further details.

Performance Optimization

• We spent significant time optimizing the core architecture of Titanium, focusing on object creation, window creation, image usage and other key areas with broad applicability. For these integral pieces:
• iOS apps will run on average 20% faster over our 3.0.0 release
• Android apps will run on average 36% faster over our 3.0.0 release
• We have also released the ListView component which functions several times faster than the TableView component.

In short you should notice a performance improvement for all of your apps running under 3.1.0.

Alloy Updates

We have also been hard at work extending Alloy, our MVC framework. The amount of positive feedback that we have received on Alloy has been outstanding, and It is being adopted at a rate faster than we ever expected.

Titanium Studio 3.1.0 now supports the following features for Alloy apps:

• Content assist
• Debugging

APIs

ListView
This release introduces ListView, a new Titanium component to replace the existing TableView. ListView uses a data-oriented approach versus TableView’s view-oriented approach which greatly improves performance.

iOS EventKit UI Framework
The iOS EventKit framework, allowing access to calendar events and reminders, is now available from within Titanium.

Modules

In this release we have also released some new modules. Specifically:

• Newsstand (iOS): Publish a magazine or periodical with Titanium
• NFC (Android): Read NFC (Near-Field Communication) tags from inside Titanium applications.
• Facebook V3 (Android, iOS) API support

New Platforms

3.1 contains support for mobile platforms beyond iOS and Android:

Tizen
Tizen is an open source, standards-based, mobile software platform supported by leading mobile operators and device manufacturers including Samsung and Intel. It is now a full member of the Titanium family, supported in Titanium 3.1.0 Studio and SDK.

BlackBerry
Our Blackberry 10 support is now in beta. Please begin building apps for the BlackBerry 10 and provide us with feedback. In this beta release we believe there are the majority of features to get you started, including Alloy support, MapView, WebView, Database, Localization Support, and much, much more.

To use the BlackBerry beta, you must download a 3.2 version of the Titanium SDK from the continuous integration (CI) server. Note that the 3.2 builds have not received any testing except for the BlackBerry beta. For all other platforms, these builds should be regarded as unstable builds

Downloading 3.1.0

For new users, download Titanium 3.1 by clicking here.

For existing Titanium Studio users, you will be prompted to update automatically on the next restart. You can also manually check for updates by selecting the “Check for Titanium SDK Updates” from the “Help” menu within Titanium Studio.

If you previously installed the Release Candidate versions of the Titanium CLI and Alloy, that is, npm install titanium@3.1.0-cr and npm install alloy@1.1.0-cr, or any -beta or -cr packages, you need to first uninstall these components before installing or updating to 3.1.0.GA. The release notes contain specific instructions on how to do so.

Node.ACS version 1.0 (GA)

Node.ACS extends Appcelerator Cloud Services by providing the popular Node.JS development framework on the middle-tier. Using Node.ACS, you can implement and deploy server services using JavaScript on the Appcelerator Cloud. You can develop connectors to enterprise data back-ends like Oracle or Salesforce for your entire mobile app portfolio, extend the functionality of prebuilt services provided by Appcelerator Cloud Services (ACS) or simply use any of the 1000’s Node.JS modules published by the developer community.

As a developer, you will immediately realize the benefits of:

• a single programming language (JavaScript) and development environment (Studio) for both client and server side code.
• a single location to host your business and application logic
• easy access to the ACS database and storage
• an MVC framework for creating scalable Node.ACS apps
• ability to update your Node.ACS app independently from your mobile app
• reliable, scalable infrastructure for your backend

With Node.ACS, Appcelerator Cloud becomes a comprehensive MBaaS (Mobile Backend-as-a-Service) that any enterprise can use for deploying the server code for its mobile apps. Node.ACS will be available as part of the Appcelerator Platform offering. Node.ACS apps can be deployed both on the public Appcelerator Cloud and a Virtual Private Cloud.

Getting Started with Node.ACS

To start developing Node.ACS apps, use the resources below:

• Node.ACS quickstart guide

Note: if you were participating in the Node.ACS developer preview, see the Node.ACS Release Notes for instructions on how to migrate your Node.ACS apps.

As always I want to thank our 450,000 strong community of developers for your constant feedback and support.

Today’s guest post comes from Titanium developer Uriel Lizama.

Titanium’s ScrollableView provides a user interface object in which you can add views as “pages”, and move through them by swiping your finger. However, there’s a small problem when you have a complex set of pages: if you’re not careful, you may be loading too much data at a time, thus making your app unstable. Uriel Lizama came up with a simple solution, where the ScrollableView will fire events every time a particular view gets and looses focus. This simple trick, with he uses on his Secrets Resorts & Spas application for the iPad app, will allow you to load and unload your user interface as needed, thus greatly improving you app’s performance.

Extending ScrollableView with Focus and Blur listeners

Several of our applications follow what we at Baboon Media like to call a magazine layout, which basically means that when you launch the application you move around the different sections by going from left to right.

For these apps we use as the main skeleton of the app a ScrollableView which will hold a view for each section of the application. Now, we had a couple of issues we needed to tackle to make this work as we needed:

• We couldn’t have everything displayed at the same time, this would generate real performance issues, specially considering that we would have some really heavy views.
• We had to detect when the user entered each specific view so we could launch animations and effects for painting the view.

We though of a simple but yet effective solution, what we did is extend the views that will be added to the ScrollableView by adding a couple of listeners that will be called whenever the view is blurred (moved away from it) or focused (move to it). This allows us to easily run the actions needed to reset the view and remove any content from it when it’s blurred, and add it back and start the animations when it’s focused.

Let’s take a look at a simple example of how you would go and easily implement this on your own project.

We create a couple of views:

We have created two views and attached on them two listeners. myfocus will be called whenever the user has moved into the view, and myblur will be called when the user has moved away from the view. In here is where you would add all your magic, on blur you would stop animations, reset positions and remove elements from the view, and then on focus add the elements back and start animations.

Now we will create our ScrollableView:

We added a couple of properties into our object, we will be using lastPage to keep track of where the user has been so we can call the blur listeners on the correct views, and mainScroller as a boolean just to make sure that we trigger actions correctly in case of bubbling.

On our ScrollableView we will add our magic on the scrollEnd event.

On Lines 3-4 we make sure that the event was triggered by the main scroller. Also we don’t want to launch the blur/focus events if the user didn’t actually move away from the view but just moved the scroller a little bit and then it snapped back, so we ignore the event if the lastPage is equal to the currentPage.

On line 8 we call the lastPage view myblur event. At this moment lastPage will hold the index of the view that was seen last.

On line 11 we call the currentPage view myfocus event.

On line 14 we set lastPage to the currentPage index, this way when we exit the view we know how to call it’s myblur event.

And that’s it, that’s the simple way to extend the ScrollableView by adding events into the views to know when to load and unload content, and that’s the way we do it in applications such as the Secrets Resorts & Spas application for the iPad.