Announcing TouchStudio v1.2 beta: fast game and physics engine, pin actions in TouchStudio, post to Facebook, and much more…

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TouchStudio99x99On 5/27/2011, the TouchStudio team is excited to announce the second update of the TouchStudio app for Windows Phone 7: TouchStudio v1.2 beta.

You can install the latest version directly via Zune.

Follow TouchStudio on Facebook to stay up to date.

Besides many performance improvements, new transition animations, and bug fixes, we added many exciting new features.

The Board: A simple, fast game and physics engine

screenshotbouncyballsscreenshotboardscriptIn previous TouchStudio releases, you could already create pictures by drawing points, lines, text, etc. With this update, we are introducing a new kind of surface: The board. A board contains a collection of items (“sprites”) that are rendered on the board, and which you can easily move around, obeying basic laws of physics that involve speed, acceleration, etc. Now you can create fun games with just a few lines of script code!

Pin actions to TouchStudio: Organize your scripts

rightTouchStudio.sc.3Just like the main Windows Phone 7 start screen, TouchStudio now also has two separate areas for pinned tiles (on the left) and for the scripts themselves (on the right). You can pin entire scripts and individual actions on the TouchStudio start screen. Press the “(+)” button in the script view to start a new script.

Social: Post to Facebook

posttofacebookIn another step of taking TouchStudio into the cloud, you can now log into Facebook from TouchStudio, and then post text, pictures, or links to your Facebook wall.

Posting on Facebook is just as easy as sending messages via SMS and email, and there are new functions to search your favorite social networks.

Data: Global variables

dataIn previous TouchStudio releases, you could already declare local variables in your action. But when an action is finished, all of the values stored in the local variables are forgotten. Now you can declare global variables in a new “data” page, which lives next to the “actions” page. Values stored in global variables are persisted, enabling the new “try park and find” sample script, which consists of two separate actions: “park” and “find”, storing your car’s location in a global variable.

Wall: Upside down, Input, Run any action

songcodesongwallWe have made many improvements to the wall. In previous TouchStudio releases, the wall was basically just the place where your program would output strings, pictures, or other values. Now, the wall is also the place where you can query the user of a script for inputs. Oh, and we also turned around the order of elements on the wall: The latest wall posts are now at the top.

Now, when you want to run an action that needs parameters (you can add parameters in the properties page of an action), you can: TouchStudio will prompt you to enter values for those parameters.

Many improvements in script editor

extractYou can now select entire subexpressions in the calculator view; this is very useful for cut, copy, paste, and the “extract” refactoring, which turns the selected subexpressions into a new local variables - a neat way to make your expressions smaller. There is also a new undo/redo feature, and you can copy&paste entire actions – very useful if you want to reuse an action in another script.

Release Notes

See the Release Notes for details of the new features and APIs, and also a list of breaking API changes.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    May 27, 2011
    That is one monster release! Gonna take a while to try out all the improvements. Nice job y'all.

  • Anonymous
    May 31, 2011
    This is a nice release, save for one MAJOR gotcha: Any and all apps you already created as well as the original samples are DELETED WITHOUT WARNING when the later release is installed. Would have really appreciated at least a warning before doing this so that I could attempt back up the existing stuff I written. Better still, I would appreciate your ADDING to the samples rather than completely replacing them because the new release appears to have much LESS in terms of samples. Good new stuff - Just please don't destroy existing content in the process!!

  • Anonymous
    May 31, 2011
    AHA: My bad -- the content was not deleted, it was just hidden away behind more unintuitive UI -- once I dug through (and crashed the app a few times trying to understand the new tile concept) I found the content.

  • Anonymous
    June 02, 2011
    It's really a great app. But a little bit lag.

  • Anonymous
    June 10, 2011
    Touch Studio is a GREAT approach! - I like it. Just when playing around I found an issue: when I try to insert time.now.subtract(value) Studio hangs up and I may not send the error to Microsoft because I've not "set up an account"... - whatever this means... :)