As we wrap up the year 2012, I’m pleased to announce what is undoubtedly the most significant release of Titanium, version 3.0. It’s also a time to look back at the year that was and take pride in some of our achievements around Titanium and our thriving developer community.
Some of the highlights include:
- Developer community now exceeds 400,000 registered developers worldwide
- Over 50,000 apps publically available
- Titanium apps now deployed on over 90 million devices (66% growth in 8 months)
- Over 320 Marketplace Modules available in the first year
- Over 1,400 enterprise customers including eBay, Merck, Mitsubishi Electric, NBC, PayPal and Ray-Ban
With the new Titanium 3.0 release we focused on the following key themes:
- Accelerating developer productivity from initial download to app creation
- Improved scalability and efficiency of code to promote reuse and maintainability
- Delivering higher-quality apps
One of the key capabilities of Titanium 3.0 is Alloy, a Model-View-Controller (MVC) Framework.
Alloy essentially decouples the visual components of the app code (in an XML-like format) from the business logic making the code significantly easier to read, manage and re-use. After 4 months in a community pre-release format, we had over 11,500 downloads and an enormous amount of positive feedback.
Alloy helps all of our users, from the novice developer to the most advanced Titans. As one of our Titan’s, Jongeun Lee, recently shared: “I’m happy to share this amazing development experience. It took ONLY 40 hours to develop the CC10Musicians app. This wouldn’t have been possible without Titanium and Alloy.”
Using Alloy, developers can build out a library of components (widgets, business logic, skins, etc..). Over time, this facilitates the creation of an “app factory” allowing them to quickly stitch together these proven components to create higher quality apps even faster. Novice users can also get up to speed even faster by leveraging our built-in sample Alloy templates. To read the Alloy docs, click here.
Regarding application quality, in Titanium 3.0 we’ve introduced on-device debugging. This allows developers to further improve the realism of the code testing and validate the actual user experience on the device. It also means you can test specific features of the app that rely on device-specific functions such as the accelerometer for movement, GPS for geo-location services and even phone calls. Also, since many device simulators aren’t available until some time after a new device ships, on-device debugging helps deliver apps for these new devices quicker. To read the debugging docs, click here.
Titanium 3.0 also includes a new CLI (Command Line Interface) aimed at helping developers improve their automation by integrating into their own development tools such as editors and continuous integrations platforms. This allows developers to automate common activities such as build, run, and directory cleanup right from the command line. To read the CLI docs, click here.
All in all, we added over 170 new features and enhancements in this release. Read the Release Notes for those additional details.
For new users, download Titanium 3.0 by clicking here.
For existing Titanium Studio users, you will be prompted to update automatically on the next restart. You can also manually check for updates by selecting the “Check for Titanium SDK Updates” from the “Help” menu within Titanium Studio.
I would like to thank our development community for all the help, support, and feedback they have given us in delivering this latest release.
