Titanium Studio - An Overview
Get the official details and download a copy here.
A product of Appcelerator’s purchase of Aptana, Titanium Studio is a quite impressive product, even though it isn’t quite as pretty as its predecessor, Titanium Developer. If you like IDEs - then you should be happy now that Titanium Studio is available.
Titanium Studio is free for any Titanium developers to use, but if you want access to the special version of Titanium Studio that includes debugging functionality, you’ll have to become a paid-up member of the Titanium Indie, Titanium Professional or Titanium Enterprise programs.
One important tip for using Titanium Studio --> get to know the following key combination:
CMD +
SHIFT + F11
OR CMD + SHIFT +
FN + F11
(depending on your keyboard setup)
This is the keyboard shortcut for the
RUN command, which will launch your app in whichever simulator you
used most recently. I know I’ll be using this a lot. Keyboard
shortcuts weren’t available in Titanium Developer, so this is a
major improvement.
I did like the previous Titanium Developer application and will
probably continue to use it until it stops working (which hopefully
will be a long way into the future), but Titanium
Studio also provides some things that you just can’t do
using Titanium Developer.
Here are some highlights...
Code Completion
Start typing some Titanium code and
you’ll soon see things popping up all over the place, giving you
lists of all the different attributes available for use in the
given situation. Select what you want from the list and press TAB,
RETURN or double-click and the code will be automatically entered
for you. This is a great time-saver (especially if you often
misspell things). Also great is that some basic documentation is
included in these popups, so you can actually learn about what the
code does, as you use it.
Debugging (requires a paid Titanium subscription)
When something isn’t working right, it
can sometimes be incredibly difficult to track it down and rectify
it. Just one misplaced comma or semi-colon can stop things working,
so it’s important to get all your code just right. The paid version
of Titanium Studio has a very powerful debugging feature that lets
you set breakpoints so that you can find exactly what is happening
and when. It should be a very useful feature. Appcelerator has
created a very informative screencast that you can find
here, which demonstrates debugging in action. Some of the
debugging features are a bit esoteric, so this screencast is well
worth a watch so that you have some idea what you’re doing.
Full featured text editor
If you haven’t used a good text editor
before, then you’ve missed out on a lot. But you’ll be happy to
know that Titanium Studio includes very thorough text editing
capabilities. Code highlighting, code folding, bundles that provide
special options for programming languages like Ruby and extensive
find/change features mean that Titanium Studio is up in the league
of BBEdit
and TextMate - a really great
league to be in.
Integrated project creation and testing
It’s all there in the one big window.
Code on the right, file manager on the left, console at the bottom
and in the top-left corner are controls to test your app on a
simulator or device. Easy to find. Easy to use.
If you’re interested in Titanium Studio, get going and download it!
You can find all the details (including a nice overview video) at:
http://developer.appcelerator.com/blog/2011/06/introducing-titanium-studio.html.