Creating Blurred Backgrounds & Overlays in Titanium

With iOS 7 and the new flat design aesthetic many apps are using a blurred background or overlay to help set depth or attention.  The Ti.BlurView iOS native module now makes this easy to implement in Titanium.  Since we are using CoreImage you can use this in iOS 6 or greater.

Below shows Ti.BlurView example app.js in action, for a full walk through see the video here.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
The Ti.BlurView module’s source is available on Github here.

You can get started today using Ti.BlurView with the following:

• Compiled Module is available here
• Examples are available here
• Documentation is available in the readme or in the documentation folder on github

Please note you need iOS 6 or greater to use this module so make sure to set the min-ios-ver in your Titanium tiapp.xml to at least the value displayed below.

<min-ios-ver>6.0</min-ios-ver>

Below is a snippet showing how to create a blurred background image similar to the Yahoo Weather app.

var mod = require('bencoding.blur');

var win = Ti.UI.createWindow({
	backgroundColor:'blue'
});

var bgView = Ti.UI.createView({
	height:Ti.UI.FILL, width:Ti.UI.FILL,
	backgroundImage:"42553_m.jpg"
});
win.add(bgView);

var blurView = mod.createView({
	height:Ti.UI.FILL,
	width:Ti.UI.FILL,
	blurLevel:5, blurCroppedToRect:false,
        backgroundView:bgView
});
bgView.add(blurView);

win.addEventListener('open',function(d){

	var container = Ti.UI.createView({
		backgroundColor:"#fff", borderRadius:20,
		top:100, height:150, left:40, right:40
	});
	blurView.add(container);
	var label = Ti.UI.createLabel({
		text:"Show how to blur like the yahoo weather app.",
		color:"#000", width:Ti.UI.FILL,
		height:50, textAlign:"center"
	});
	container.add(label);

});

win.open();

You can also use the applyBlurTo method to create your own Blur View containers.  For information on how to do this please see the documentation here.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.