If you're going to do iOS you must use a Mac. Android, of course, can be developed on any Mac, Windows or Linux. Unless you have a compelling reason to run multiple OSs why complicate you system and backups? If you want to play around on other OSs just get another computer for that.
Apple's online store sells refurbished machines under their full warranty (at least in the US). My experience is these computers are better than new and often sell for 30% less than retail. Just about any modern system is sufficient to support mobile development which doesn't require anything special in the way of processing power. A large display is useful for coding. I find a Macbook laptop with an external display at my desk works nicely. The laptop can travel to conferences, meetings and other events. I recommend a pretty large built-in hard drive (>= 500GB) for all the development systems. (Although see my description of my external drive development system below.) Expect to up the system RAM to at least 4GB. If you are going to be creating or manipulating assets like graphics for use in a custom UI or a game you will want the larger display for that too. A dedicated external drive, NAS or better yet RAID-5 NAS is required for local backups. And a cloud-based repository is needed for remote backups of your projects and assets. (You can never have too many backup systems.) Don't just think about it. Do it! I actually run my entire development system from an external drive. That way I can take my laptop to a public event without any proprietary code or assets on it. If my computer dies I can plug the drive into another Mac, and I can be up and running in minutes (I have a Mac Mini connected to my HDTV that can be impressed in an emergency). If the external drive dies I can reconstruct it exactly from back-ups in a few hours maximum. - Richard Lawler -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en
