In this series of tutorials we use Appcelerator’s Titanium Mobile platform to create Android applications. This tutorial goes over the installation and configuration of the Android SDK and Titanium Mobile on a Windows 7.

• Installation & setup of Titanium Mobile
• How to make your first Android application with Titanium Mobile
• How to make a Soundboard application with Titanium Mobile
• How to make a Device Information application with Titanium Mobile

Java

Although our Titanium application will be created using Javascript, the Android SDK (which Titanium sits on top of) runs on Java. It’s likely you already have the JRE (Java Runtime Enviroment) installed on your computer, this allows Java applications to run. However to develop applications using Java (and hence Titanium) you will need the JDK (Java Development Kit). Head over to the Oracle website, download and install it. If you have already created Java applications before, this will probably already be installed on your system.

Android SDK

The next step is to get the Android SDK. Download, install and start the application (SDK Manager). Once it’s up and running you will be prompted to install different versions of the Android SDK, documentation and samples. You must install Android SDK Platform-tools. The choice of SDK versions is up to you. If you only intend to develop for Android 2.2, then only choose the 2.2 package. If you want your application to run on all versions of Android, then select all 1.X and 2.X packages. The 3.0 API isn’t stablised yet so Titanium does not support it. Also install Google’s Third Party Addons such as Google Maps and USB Device Support.

Configuring Paths

The last thing we need to do before installing Titanium is to set two environment variables and edit the Path environment variable. This must be done because Titanium checks these environment variables to find the correct path to the JDK and Android SDK. There are a couple of ways to set environment variables, the quickest and easiest way to do this is to type system variables into the search bar of the Windows Menu.

Clicking the Enviroment Variables button brings up this screen..

We need to add 2 environment variables:

android_sdk – The path to the Android SDK, similar (if not the same) to C:\Program Files\Android\android-sdk-windows

JAVA_HOME – The path to the JDK, similar (if not the same) to C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_24

We also need to add Java and the Android SDK to the Path environment variable. Select the Path environment variable and click edit. It will bring up a dialog box which contains of a long string of file system paths. Scroll to the far right and append ;C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_24\bin;C:\Program Files\Android\android-sdk-windows\platform-tools (or the appropriate paths to those directories). The semi colon is used as a delimiter, you must include them.

Titanium

Finally we can install Titanium. Head on over to the Appcelerator website and download Titanium Developer. Once installed Titanium Developer should automatically download the Titanium Mobile SDK. If it doesn’t then a notification will appear in the top right hand corner of Titanium Developer and you can install it by clicking on the notification.

Test Application

Now that the Android SDK and Titanium is installed and configured we can finally start making applications. Click the New Project button at the top of Titanium Developer. Select Mobile application and fill out the appropriate fields.

After the project is created click the Test & Package tab and then click the Launch button. Titanium will compile your application and launch it in the Emulator.

Next week we will build a native Android application using Titanium Mobile. It will download and parse an RSS feed and display the items in a TableView. When the item is clicked the default Android web browser will open and navigate to that web page. To be notified when that tutorial is published subscribe to our twitter or rss feeds.