Appcelerator Titanium: Up and Running

Chapter 2. Getting Set Up to Use Titanium

Because Titanium creates a native project for whatever platform you are targeting from JavaScript code, you need to have the native compilers installed for whichever platforms you want to run the app on. This chapter explains your options.

Selecting a Development Environment

If you want to do iOS development, you’ll need to get a Mac. When I first got into mobile development, and wanted to get my feet wet while investing the least amount of money, I bought a Mac Mini. It worked very well for iPhone development.

Android development is more platform-agnostic, but you’ll want to get something with plenty of horsepower. Compiling for Android is more CPU intensive than compiling for iOS, so if a decent amount of your work will be for Android, think about getting something like a MacBook Pro. The current lineup of MacBook Pro laptops are a great combination of portability and power.

Note

Depending on what kind of environment you’ll be working in, seriously consider a laptop. Nothing beats being able to pick up your development environment for a quick demo or a trip to the local Starbucks.

And the importance of memory is as true as ever. Additional memory for Mac or Windows will help speed up things. I expanded my MacBook Pro with memory bought from Amazon and it worked fine. Don’t think that low-cost memory is cheap or will not work. But as always, your results may vary.

Recent changes to the Titanium engine for Android makes it possible to make changes ...