In Dr. Seuss's The Sneetches and Other Stories, Sylvester McMonkey McBean makes a machine that Sneetches without stars on their bellies can hop into and out they pop as Star-Belly Sneetches.

(Click here or on the book cover image to go to Handshake 2.0's Amazon Associates link where you can see a close-up of McBean's machine in the process of transforming Plain-Belly Sneetches to those with "stars upon thars" by clicking "See larger image and other views.")

I think of Titanium Appcelerator as McBean's machine.

Appcelerator is an open source, cross-platform software development tool. I am part of the Network of Women Mobile Application Developers using Appcelerator.

I've got a PC running Windows 7.  With the help of Ryan Hagan, Sallie Dodson, and Alex Edelman, I've installed Titanium Appcelerator for Windows 7.
 
I start a new project and it asks me to store the project on my hard drive.  Appcelerator installs a folder with some files in the place on my hard drive that I specify.
 
One of the files is a JavaScript file.
 
I open that JavaScript file with a text editor (Notepad has been my editor of choice but I've downloaded Notepad++  and it looks pretty cool).   Whether I use Notepad or Notepad++, I write a JavaScript program with lines of code in the same nice white box in which I might write an HTML page. Instead of starapp.txt, it's saved as starapp.js.

When my code is ready, I click some buttons and Appcelerator sucks that starless file into its "machine" and out pops an Android app - a Sneetch with a star on its belly - displayed in Appcelerator's Emulator.
 
If I were using a Mac, I could use another Appcelerator button to create files that could be submitted, each respectively, to the Android Market or to the iTunes App Store.

One star app Appcelerated into two star apps for two platforms.

"Then the big machine roared and it klonked. And it bonked. And it jerked. And it berked. And it bopped them about. But the thing really worked!"

Yes, Appcelerator works. We've used it to make Handshake Media's mobile apps - our own star apps.