What do you want from Sencha Touch 2.1?
March 14, 2012 22 Comments
Disclaimers: this is the most unofficial, non-Sencha-backed poll of all time. There’s no guarantee we’ll ever do any of it, yada yada.
Touch 2.0 went GA last week to easily the best product launch reception I’ve seen. It was great and the feedback’s wonderful but honeymoons are boring – I want to know what’s wrong with it 🙂
So, what do you want to see in Sencha Touch 2.1? I asked on Twitter just now and got a bunch of responses so here are some ideas. Even if what you want is on this list already drop a reply in the comments so I know more than one person cares about it:
We do of course have a few ideas up our sleeves too, but why spoil the surprise?
Ed Spencer 
-) A proper way to use Animator projects as components, I’ve hacked it into working… but the Animator engineers seem to be building in the dark ages of javascript with little knowledge of the practices you guys are building in the new core. Animator’s output needs a javascript makeover by someone who knows intimately how ExtJS4.1 and ST2 do rendering
-) A system or best practice for pushing hash locations to the browser while doing things like hitting back in a navigation view
-) more robust options for NavigationView’s push and pop methods (check out my stackpanel for ST1 on the market ;-), with StackPanel I can specify how the card i’m adding should be animated, if it should clear all or some of its ancestors from history after transitioning (an example usage of this would be loading my home view into the navview after a successful login — i want the login form to be replaced in the history stack without needing to nest the navigationview in a card layout
Helper tools for performance optimization,
e.g. having a log level for the logger. One level prints out some nice readable info on what’s being initialized, etc. and how long each step took.
Which then can be used with remote debugging.
Just my two cents / dream. 🙂
MapBox maps integration!
Windows 8 Metro support.
– A templates that would generate – iPhone with tabbars and toobars navigation and for iPad – SplitView with tabbars.
– Integration with Leaflet (mapping framework), there is already Leaflet for ST 1 in forum. I think Sencha should integrate to ST 2 soon. And use Leaflet-vector-layers as well.
https://github.com/JasonSanford/leaflet-vector-layers
I would like to see exception events in the data readers so things like the server being down or malformed data and such can be caught and acted upon instead of just failing.
+1 on integration of Animator projects/components!
In HTC issue with text field background. So it will be good if it will fix in next release.
Windows 8 Metro UI support!
Infinite scrolling lists
A grid control
Bing maps control
Sparklines and stock charts
Deployment documentation, for the major platforms.
Why not, bb playbook support.
one code set spec. A comprehensive file/directory spec document that specifies down to the file and contents (if possible) how to layout your next app so that you could use it with something like PhoneGap’s build(er).
Personally, I don’t mind paying for a service like PGB to avoid having to have all the development environments my computers. I am just unsure how one handles complex cases like when you create a custom phonegap plugin.
Right now (correct me if I am wrong) one still has to have all the different environments to deploy apps.
Tanepiper mentioned disabling the Android back button. I would rephrase that to say that PhoneGap lets you intercept and handle backbutton, menubutton, and searchbutton events,
eg: http://docs.phonegap.com/en/1.0.0/phonegap_events_events.md.html#backbutton
Several comments in other parts of the forum also point out that the Android back button exits a program when it has nothing to go back to. For some apps, this is very ungraceful. I would like to see Touch allow intercepting and handling these events.
I suspect that being able to intercept and handle handling other events listed on the http://docs.phonegap.com/en/1.0.0/phonegap_events_events.md.html page would be useful too.
graphs & charts, calendar view & calendar database.
A grid control +1
Better documentation,
Grid control,
better documentation,
dataview/carousel hybrid,
better documentation,
ignoring people who ask for windows support
Two things I am missing:
1) Allowing the Navigator View to add items other than title to the navigation bar for each view added and removing them again (displyaing items of previous view) when going back on the stack. I’m very close to a working implementation for this… but would be nice if it was built in and worked using the animations, createProxy (ghosts) etc.
2) Better REST Proxy (or examples) – how to synchronize a localstorage datastore with remote storage using a REST API (fx Rails). Doesn’t work to use save(), synchronizing single record at a time. I guess I could use Ajax directly or some Ajax framework (fx via jQuery) but…
Compatibility with Windows 8 ! 🙂
Unit testing so old stuff isn’t broken 😛
Windows 8 metro support !
A nice gridview component to use with charts