Getting Appcelerator Titanium to Work on My Mac

After climbing a few rungs of the Java+Android SDK ladder trying to make my own apps, and partially succeeding, I begin to look around to see if there was a better/easier to grok way to make Android apps. I found the Appcelerator Titanium project, and had a big-ole wootfest!

Sadly however, I was soon to have the unfortunate experience of trying to get this pretty flakey thing to work.

Starting from an environment where I had already produced working code and gotten it from my computer onto both my phone and an emulator using the Eclipse IDE, I thought I would be 10 steps ahead. Nope. I met with many many errors such as the very much not helpful:

“Project creation error: Error creating project. Please try again.”

and the marvelously not helpful:

“[ERROR] Failed installing com.example.hello: pkg: /data/local/tmp/app.apk”

or the entirely show-stopping “Loading” + “Loading” display on SDK: and Screen:

Apparently I am not the only person who has experienced these issues, in the past many months, but it seems that the folks at Appcelerator don’t seem keen on taking care of these roadblocks to adoption of their product. The Appcelerator Q&A has plenty of people asking how to get past these two errors.

Well, just in case anyone wants the quick and illustrated way to solve these issues, here it is.

Problem: Project creation error: Error creating project. Please try again.

My solution for this problem was to ensure that Android SDK and AVD Manager had ALL of the Available Packages installed.

1. Shut down any emulators, and Titanium.
2. Open the Android SKD and AVD Manager, by finding the “android” application in your Android SDK tools folder.
3. Go to Available Packages and select any SDK’s that might not be installed, and then install them.
4. You may need to recreate your Project in Titanium.

Problem: [ERROR] Failed installing com.example.hello: pkg: /data/local/tmp/app.apk

My solution for this one is much simpler, and is answered many times in the Q&A’s, but isn’t easy to figure out at first, so I will illustrate it:

Problem: SDK: Loading ... Screen: Loading ...

My solution to this problem was drastic, but seemed to be the only thing that would work. This is a problem you may encounter if you encountered the other problems, as I believe they are related.

The solution I used was to remove the configuration files, and re-open Titanium, letting it setup again:

1. Open a terminal and execute the following commands:
2. sudo rm -rf /Library/Application\ Support/Titanium/
3. rm -rf ~/Library/Application\ Support/Titanium/
4. Open Titanium, and make sure you update if it needs it.

That’s about all of the answers I have for this, and if you get past all of the problems, you should get to see: