Announcing TouchStudio

TouchStudio99x99Today, we are excited to announce a new project from the Research in Software Engineering group at Microsoft Research: TouchStudio.

TouchStudio allows you to script your phone. TouchStudio is a new programming environment built around a single core idea: the programs are authored and executed on mobile devices. No other computers are needed.downloadwp7

TouchStudio is now available on the Windows Phone marketplace.

After moving Pex to the web with Pex4Fun, and enabling basic C#/VB/F# programming as a game on the phone via a dedicated WP7 app for Pex4Fun, TouchStudio now finally takes programming on the phone serious as an activity in its own right.

Update: Watch the Channel 9 video "TouchStudio - Script Your Phone ON Your Phone!"

A bigger vision

TouchStudio.sc.8

We have many ideas how to make programming on the phone a really fun and productive experience: The touchscreen needs to be considered as a special input device – brilliant resolution for viewing, but difficult to navigate precisely; all the sensors of the phone should be easily available to the program; the phone is always connected to the cloud.

TouchStudio version 1.0.0.0, which has just been released to the marketplace, is already a fully functional development environment to edit and run code. But not all aspects of our vision are realized yet: Not all sensors are exposed yet, the cloud is not yet used as a backing store and for state sharing, and more.

Stay updated and look out for future versions of TouchStudio!

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Comments

  • Anonymous
    April 11, 2011
    Huge potential, looking forward to seeing where this is going. Not a bad job coping with the relatively small real-estate. Would love to be able to pin a specific script as a tile to the start screen.  Even in it's current form I could use that to support device side auto-playlists.

  • Anonymous
    April 11, 2011
    I'll echo Joes's sentiment regarding pinning scripts.  First thing I tried to do was tap and hold a script to see if a context menu was available to do such a  thing.  I suspect this is currently a limitation of the OS (can you pin anything other than contacts and apps?).  At any rate, a very cool app to show the iOS crowd in a "Yeah, but can your phone do THIS?" way.  Great job!

  • Anonymous
    April 12, 2011
    As you discovered, pinning of scripts is not supported yet. Thanks for your feedback!

  • Anonymous
    April 13, 2011
    yeah.. great app! very interesting! Is it developped on silverlight for phone 7 ? I can hardly imagine to do all these only with silverlight..

  • Anonymous
    April 14, 2011
    Ivan: yes, TouchStudio was written entirely in C#/Silverlight, using only the publicly available and documented WP7 libraries.

  • Anonymous
    April 19, 2011
    Great app! Is it possible to generate a playlist from a search and then play it?