Ever since we first unveiled the original Sencha Touch, we’ve been raising expectations of what HTML5 apps can do. Almost two years ago, Sencha Touch pioneered a whole new way of creating mobile apps that run across multiple platforms with HTML5. Since then, HTML5 has become the most important advance in application development in the last decade. And today we’re proud to announce the release of Sencha Touch 2.0. We’re certain it will change the way you think about mobile apps.
Download Sencha Touch 2 Download SDK Tools beta View Release Notes
Sencha Touch 2 delivers a major upgrade to the app experiences that you create, the efficiency of your work as a developer, and the ability of your apps to participate in the mobile ecosystem.
### Built for Speed
When we first thought about what to improve for Sencha Touch 2, one thing was at the top of our list: performance. Performance is a broad-ranging attribute, and one of extreme importance to application users. We’ve left no stone unturned in Sencha Touch 2, optimizing scrolling frame rates, layout speed, load time, and even how quickly a button responds to touch.
View on the App Gallery
In order to create great user experiences, we felt that mobile web apps had to get a lot faster. We’ve previously focused on making apps feel much faster when they’re being used. Today we’re adding another leap forward in startup performance.
#### Startup Speed
Startup performance is critical for every app, but web apps have some special challenges. Traditionally, mobile web content has been fetched from remote web servers over high latency connections and inefficient redundant http connections. Mobile web caches have been known for their rudimentary capabilities. While data-driven Ajax UI’s have improved post-startup responsiveness, Ajax by itself, does little to improve initial application load.
The key to improving startup time is twofold — make fewer requests and transfer less data. Sencha Touch 2 does both. First, our new one-line build command automatically pares your app to the minimum possible number of files, which minimizes the number of http requests. Second, our groundbreaking new app loader caches your entire application within localStorage. This bypasses the need to download the app on a user’s second visit- in fact your app could load without making a single web request. This can yield a stunning improvement in the startup speed of your web app — in our example application below, the second visit time is 250% faster when using our loader.
The loader automatically handles application changes. So whenever a user launches your app, the loader automatically checks for updates. If you’re running an older version of the app, it’ll create and download a delta update containing only the changes compared to the version on your device. Because most app updates are small relative to the full size of the app, delta updates mean that your app spends substantially less time on startup. We think the user experience will be radically better, making many connectivity and network latency issues a thing of the past.
We think this levels the playing field between native and web apps. To show how impactful it can be, we’ve equipped all our examples with our new loader. We’ve also created a demonstration video that shows it in action. Watch a quick demo video on Vimeo
Our loader technology is baked into the Sencha SDK Tools, which also sees a new release today. Our new release of the tools includes scaffolding, a simple but powerful capability that automates MVC class creation, deployment which makes it easy to build and deploy your apps, and packaging, to make wrapped apps for native app stores. Download Touch 2 with the new SDK Tools, then watch the new getting started video to see how easy it is to write Sencha Touch 2 apps.
View on the App Gallery
### Built for Great Experiences
We’re releasing a collection of fantastic demo applications with Sencha Touch 2 to show you the range of engaging user experiences you can build with it. First is The Watch List — an immersive social movie experiment built by the Touch team. Combining data from Facebook’s Open Graph, YouTube’s HTML5 video API and Flixster’s Movie API, we wanted to share how easy it is to build a world class app. The Watch List can be used to share the movies you’ve seen and want to see. We hope that you enjoy using it as much as we enjoyed building it.
### Built for the Mobile Ecosystem
We all love using web technology to build our apps, and in many cases deploying your app from a web server (and avoiding the hassles of app stores) will be the appropriate distribution choice. To make it easier to monetize mobile web deployment, we’ve partnered with AT&T to deliver their carrier-grade API’s for billing, location and more through Sencha Touch. Read more about how you can equip your mobile web app with carrier billing powered by AT&T.
There are also times when your users or your customers want to install and update your app via a native app store. With Sencha Touch 2, that’s as simple as typing a single command. The Sencha SDK Tools now include native packaging, which lets you package and build your application as an Android .apk or an iOS .ipa. The best part? The SDK Tools work on both Mac and Windows, meaning PC developers can package iOS applications. It’s a major step forward for developers since your development platform no longer limits your choice of app stores. For enterprises standardized on Windows, you can use Sencha SDK Tools to package your iOS app as a part of your own internal build process.
In addition to the new packaging features, we’ve also enabled a set of native device APIs that work on both iOS and Android. These device APIs are Camera, Orientation, Network Connectivity, and native confirmation dialogs. The APIs are all accessible from JavaScript and provide identical semantics and signatures regardless of platform.
View on the App Gallery
### Built for You!
We’ve also been busy recording screencasts. We’ve done a huge amount of work making Sencha Touch 2 easier to learn and easier to build expertise in. We’ve updated the Sencha SDK Tools, so creating apps is easier than ever. While the SDK Tools are not required to build Sencha Touch 2 apps, they can make app development much easier (and faster). To show you just how easy it is to get started we’ve created a video that creates and deploys a simple app in thirty minutes. Watch the Getting Started video on Vimeo
The new live demonstration videos are part of the massive expansion in learning materials we’ve created for Sencha Touch 2. The new documentation center features complete API documentation as well as over 35 in-depth guides on everything from getting started to native packaging.
View on the App Gallery
### Built for Amazing Apps
Sencha Touch 2 sets a new bar for mobile HTML5 applications. You’ll be excited to hear that Sencha Designer 2.0 works in harmony with all of the new deployment features and will support Sencha Touch 2.0 final in our next auto update. You can also look forward to Touch Charts updated to work with Sencha Touch 2. We are proud of this release, but we’re even prouder when we think of the amazing applications that you’ll build with it.
With over 15,000 forum posts in the Sencha Touch 2 forums to date, we are incredibly grateful for the input and energy of our engaged and knowledgeable community. The community helps with everything from helping newcomers get familiar with the framework to advising on those final polishing touches. Ultimately, the measure of our success is only the reflection of the amazing apps that we help you build! We hope we’re equipping you to build extraordinary apps!
Download Sencha Touch 2 Download SDK Tools beta View Release Notes
h4. Follow Sencha Touch 2 Development
If you missed all the great progress in our development of Sencha Touch 2, catch up with our release blog posts from the last three weeks:
* *Feb 1*: “Sencha Touch 2 Beta”:https://www.sencha.com/blog/sencha-touch-2-raising-the-bar/
* *Feb 8*: “Sencha Touch 2 Beta 2”:https://www.sencha.com/blog/dive-into-dataview-with-sencha-touch-2-beta-2/ and a tutorial on DataView
* *Feb 14*: “Sencha Touch 2 Beta 2”:https://www.sencha.com/blog/sencha-touch-2-beta-3-kindle-fire-and-chrome-support/ added support for Kindle Fire, and Chrome for Android
* *Feb 22*: “Sencha Touch 2 Release Candidate”:https://www.sencha.com/blog/sencha-touch-2-rc-native-packaging/
* *Mar 6*: “Sencha Touch 2 GA”:https://www.sencha.com/blog/announcing-sencha-touch-2/
Congratulations guys!!! This has to be the best piece of work your team has put out to date!
Congrats with this release!
Wow! Congratulations from the Netherlands!
This is awesome news. Good job!
Huge congrats!! Thank you for this wonderful framework!
Also, thank you for allowing us to have such great jobs :)
Great news! Can’t wait to see now Touch Charts 2.0 to finally upgrade my application!
Congratulations guys! Keep going!
Congratulations too from germany!
Congratulations!
I’m already looking forward to the Touch Charts 2.0 release ;-)
Congrats for this great job!
Exciting news! Will be watching anxiously for the ST2 Charts update now.
Congratulations! Can’t wait for the PlayBook version ;)
Btw, the watch list app doesn’t detect the PlayBook and shows users a phone interface inside a web page. Not a great experience.
Congratulations!
great … thanks a lot!!
Looks great, can’t wait to start playing with it next week!
This is a master piece of work! I’ve been working with all the PR’s, Betas and I’m really excited about the speed and how smooth it’s on a real iPad/iPhone.
Good job guys!
Congrats to the Team.
Best time to start a new ST2 project ;-) Thanks
Big Congrats to the team!
You are blowing us away in every release!
Awesome, team! I’m excited to migrate our project from 1.1 to 2.
Great work now please get back to work on ExtJS, would be great to see 4.1 before the one year anniversary of 4.0.
Nicely done guys, very impressive stuff.
Awesome job! Congratulations!
THANKS!!!!! GREAT NEWS!
just so you’d know – some examples seem to not work after deployment of the 2.0.0 version on a webserver. I think its something with the microloader or something like that. for example, the oreilly app stopped working (Status 404 for /st2/examples/production/oreilly/index.htm”). on RC2 is runs just fine.
Nice work! You mention a new version of the SDK Tools, but the download page still links to the Developer Preview. Is this new version available yet?
Excellent work!!! Can’t wait for Touch Charts 2!!!
Fanstastic, but how about finishing GXT3.0?
Any plans for supporting Linux with the Sencha SDK Tools?
Awesome work, finally it is out in the wild :), congratulations for all who been involved.
Kudos to the Sencha Team… I feel all warm and fuzzy inside!
I think something is wrong with the DL link of the SDK tools too…
First, congratulations and well done! Second… please clarify something for me: This article says “…our groundbreaking new app loader caches your entire application within localStorage”. Through PR, Beta, and RC versions, I did not notice this feature. Where is it in the API documentation?
Congrats. Excellent work guys!
You’re huge! Thanks a lot for you work..
@dave Yes, this is part of the updated Sencha SDK Tools. There is a guide here: http://docs.sencha.com/touch/2-0/#!/guide/command I’m sure there will be more to come as well.
Nice work on the performance improvements.
Quite disappointed that your UI is still basically iOS-only. Building web-powered applications that look native on Android (and eventually Windows Phone 7) is important to me. As more and more major projects are cross-platform these days, it seems like a poor omission.
As I don’t make applications that only work on iOS, I’m afraid I still have to pass on Sencha Touch.
Congratulations! Hope to see soon the ExtJS 4.1 release too!
@Ron Thank you for the feedback. I think that many of our examples, especially older ones tend to feel more ‘iOS’ like in nature. As the UI design is quite flexible, we feel the developers are free to create quite different experiences per platform to retain a more ‘native’ feel to them. Especially when using a Profile to do so (http://docs.sencha.com/touch/2-0/#!/api/Ext.app.Profile) combined with excellent History support for Android’s built in back button methods of navigation. In addition I believe with some of the newer examples such as The Watch List (htp://www.watchlistapp.com) we’re showing a bit more universal feel.
I hope you take a deeper look at some point to see what is possible with Sencha Touch 2 in the future. As we hope to continue enhancing the product and bridging more platforms in the future
Awesome job guys! I appreciate you leading the HTML5 path.
@Ron It’s also worth noting that we ship with 3 additional themes for other platforms, that also demonstrate how easy it is to make your own. Similarly, we’ve modified some of the heavily iOS-centric UI, like badges, to be more generic… and prettier, IMO :)
Congrats on the release. It has been a fun journey watching this framework go through all the changes from 1.x -> 2.0. Very, very impressed!
Awesome job ! Congrats !
Thanks a lot….& Congrats for your Amazing Effortzzz………
Great Effort….Thanks a lot…..Expecting more….
Can you now move the talent that worked on Touch back to ExtJS so we have some sort of chance of getting a working framework by the end of the year.
Wow! amazing job. The performance is really great. Hope that you will add new components too, such as a table view…. Any way great work.
Congratulations!
Hey, This is awesome.You have made it.We are excited to work with this amazing framework.Let “THIS IS THE FUTURE” slogan be true.
Awesome! You make my life happier :) Thanks Guys! Can’t wait to use the Designer 2 as well….
Nice! But i’m getting a lot of “page not found” errors. I installed Sencha touch 2 on a server for testing and a lot of the examples also give “page not found errors” Will there be an update that fixes those issues?
Looks like most of the examples are trying to load content from “dsnextgen.com” Next thing that happens is an an error showing “Content not available” For example http://evilleader.com/docs/#!/example/carousel
Forget about the dsnextgen.com comment. That was some nasty custom 404 error trick by my crappy provider. But It still looks like the content of the examples can not be found. I’m using the “Free Commercial Version” by the way.
Thanks… some resources in examples are linked to /examples/production directory, which does not exist…
Great job Guys! Hope to use it one day soon. Now that Touch 2.0 is GA can all of the Touch dev team start work on EXTJS 4.1 and sort out all the issues? EXTJS its been lacking resource, priority and playing second fiddle to Touch ever since the Sencha buyout.
We’d all like to build some amazing EXTJS apps too
Regards
MrSparks
Hello,
It’s great, but unfortunately most of the examples just don’t work. I’ve managed to fix one or two by copying the content of the “Examples” folder in the missing “Production” folder, but Kitchen Sink, for instance, still don’t work.
@Mado @Fred Looks like out site server version of the documentation (a data.js file) was inadvertently put into the distribution. We’ll fix that right away. If you go straight to your examples directory, that should work until we replace that file.
Great work guys! Coming from Sencha Touch 1.1, this still feels like a huge leap forwards. Since the early version of ST2 I’ve seen my bugs.js shrinking week-by-week because of your hard work :)
Can’t wait to start testing on ST3 ;)
Really appreciate the effort you guys have put in, Congratulations!!
Also great work with the documentation and examples.
Thank you!!
Just wanted to say a thank you from the whole Touch team for all the kind words. We really put our hearts and souls into this and we’re happy to see it so well received.
Congratulations to Sencha Team on doing such a great job. Again you guys proved yourself. You did it!
New Layout Engine
Facebook Integration Samples
Sencha Designer 2.0 for Sencha Touch 2
Sencha SDK Tools for native packaging and several other core features sets Sencha Touch 2 as a master in Mobile Web Frameworks.
I have a doubt whether the Facebook Integration works when we take the App native using the Sencha SDK, especially with oAuth2 with redirectURL.
FINALLY!!!
Kudos! Im very excited to start to work with sencha 2
Fantastic, thanks guys! Can’t wait to download & have a play
Congrats from Sydney Australia
These people are robots.
congratulations ..anxious to try it out
Congratulations for the great release…!
Was waiting for it :) Great job :)
Best news this week!
Thanks for this great folks, you awesome folks at Sencha.
BTW: At the end of his preso Apple’s Tim Cook announced yesterday that this year will be full of innovation. I’m pretty sure they’ll release touchscreen MacBooks and maybe touchscreen iMacs within the next 10 months, the technical basis being 10.8 Mountain Lion. So IMO this means Sencha Touch will be important on mobile devices and ordinary PCs as well… Are you prepared for this? :)
Just downloaded it. Thanks!
Impressive!
Sench Touch 2 still does not works on Fire Fox
@Durrab: Maybe this will happen as soon as Firefox for mobile devices has enough market share, but today, Firefox for mobile is more an esoteric creature than a real browser.
@Markus Wichmann
I have a requirement to make one Open URL based Application not only for Mobile Devices but also for Desktop PCs. Then I expect Sencha Touch 2 for all the browsers.
I work in Saudi Oil Company ARAMCO and because of this I have not convinced them on Sencha Touch 2 because Sencha Touch 2 is not all browsers compatible.
Today I just checked that Sencha Touch 2 claims for cross browser support – But still not
This is good news. Good job!
@Durrab: Besides the question which exact browser someone uses, let’s assume for a moment that you had this intended application implemented already. How would desktop PC users interact with the UI? Would you expect them to perform touch-interface-like gestures using the mouse pointer? Don’t get me wrong: this is viable, of course. I’m just curious… :)
@Markus Wichmann
My friend, some times we have requirement of BIG clients Company like ARAMCO which is trillionair Company. They want one application should run everywhere with ERP. So if that does not work and its an issue. I dont want Gestures or anything on Desktop PC but I want one open url based Application which runs on Browser of PC and mobile devices. we only allow IE and Fire Fox in our organization and Sencha Touch fails on it. Even though the Requirements are very simple just charts and Lists of different Dashboards. After alot of discussion we still stick to Flex instead of Sencha Touch. :)
@Durrab: Sencha Touch is a framework based on modern technologies like CSS3, JavaScript, and HTML5. There are browsers that do not support HTML5/CSS3 at all or support it rudimentarily. Internet Explorer still is the most retarded browser in existance, also with respect to HTML5. It’s not Sencha Touch that fails to support IE , it’s just that IE does not really support HTML5, at least not any IE version before IE10.
So this brings us to Flex. Adobe itself has announced to “aggressively contribute to HTML5” in the future. In Nov 2011, Adobe have said this: “However, HTML5 is now universally supported on major mobile devices, in some cases exclusively. This makes HTML5 the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms.” (see Adobe’s blog: http://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2011/11/flash-focus.html). The flash player is already no longer being developed for any mobile platform as of 2012. Please keep that in mind.
I wish you every success with your application, no matter what technology you’ll be using.
@Durrab: Sencha Touch is a framework based on modern technologies like CSS3, JavaScript, and HTML5. There are browsers that do not support HTML5/CSS3 at all or support it rudimentarily. Internet Explorer still is the most retarded browser in existance, also with respect to HTML5. It’s not Sencha Touch that fails to support IE , it’s just that IE does not really support HTML5, at least not any IE version before IE10.
So this brings us to Flex. Adobe itself has announced to “aggressively contribute to HTML5” in the future. In Nov 2011, Adobe have said this: “However, HTML5 is now universally supported on major mobile devices, in some cases exclusively. This makes HTML5 the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms.” (see Adobe’s blog: http://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2011/11/flash-focus.html). The flash player is already no longer being developed for any mobile platform as of 2012. On http://blogs.adobe.com/flex/2011/11/your-questions-about-flex.html the Adobe flex team answers the question “Does Adobe recommend we use Flex or HTML5 for our enterprise application development?” with “In the long-term, we believe HTML5 will be the best technology for enterprise application development.” Please keep all that in mind.
I wish you every success with your application, no matter what technology you’ll be using.
Hello,
I still don’t understand why it doesn’t work with Firefox or IE. So it’s useless for a multi platform web application (phone, tablette, tv and desktop). Can’t you get a degraded version for these browsers ?
Cedric, Durrab… Sencha Touch is inherently based on HTML5+CSS3+ECMAScript. IE does not support HTML5. It’s this so-called “browser” named IE that is “degraded”. BTW, Durrab, what mobile platforms are you targetting? Firefox for mobile devices is not at all a very wide-spread browser…
We are basically targetting iPhone / iPad but we need to save our development cost and have one application for Desktop PC and iPhone / iPad.
Safari, Chrome are ban here and we have only option for IE and Fire Fox.
We don’t want to deploy our apps to App Store and Android Market because these Applications will be used within the our organization.
Can you provide specific information on compatibility of Ext 4.1 and Touch 2.0? For example, if I have non- UI code that uses the Model, Store, and Proxy classes of Ext will this code run unchanged in Touch?
This looks great! Is there any plans to support mobile internet explorer?
Great job!! Congratulations!
@Shane, @CedricA, It is something we’re pursuing. For this release we wanted to target performance on the most popular devices and create a solid foundation before moving to some of the other browsers.
good job
Fantastic work. Congrats!
Congratulations guys!! Good Job Ed Spencer and rest of team !!
This is very exciting ! Can you elaborate with examples how partnering with AT&T helps ? How it is different than device API , say for location ? How does it work with SMS / MMS.
Thanks,
Sudhir
I’m excited about the release, and would love to know about the 3 themes (@David @Ron). Can you point me to a link explaining an iOS/Android deployment?
Also, @gkatz might be onto something with the microloader issue, I’m having difficulty getting stuff deployed on the web server. Any thoughts?
Great Job!
Looks very exciting.
I think the blog title is wrong though as this is about animator, not touch.
Oops! Little error in our CMS, fixed now.
Congratulations from Singapore.
Congratulations!
When generating kitchensink1 and kitchensink2 we can see a big difference in rendering time.
There is a kind of prediction to a touch chart library for Sencha Touch 2 ?
Impressed. Can’t wait to tryout.
The guides of sencha touch 2 can not be clearly seen on the Ipad, because the right part of the text gets cut off. If you guys could fix this would really help because it would be possible to study the framework anywhere any time.
Congrats!! It all looks great!.
I’m very disappointed to see that Sencha no longer works with Phonegap. Sure there is now native packaging, but -with all due respect- this does not not even come close to what Phonegap has to offer. So it is goodbye to Sencha Touch in our company for now… shame.
@AndyD. You can still keep using PhoneGap/Cordova to wrap a Sencha Touch app if you prefer to keep working with that as your packager.
Nice way of introducing information about new technologies. Nice job…
I cannot run kitchen sink in ipad1 with ios 3.2.2!
I am so there! Thanks guys!
How would you go about adding animated elements to an app. I’m specifically interested in giving user feedback with animation at various benchmarks in the app.
Nice! But i’m getting a lot of “page not found” errors. I installed Sencha touch 2 on a server for testing and a lot of the examples also give “page not found errors” Will there be an update that fixes those issues?
I know I am retarded to use iPad 1 and probably I am the last person in the world to use it….except maybe other retards in remote African villages or people in North Korea who know no better, but none of the demos I have tried work on iPad 1. iPod 2 experiences lots of issues as well. Does this mean Sencha 2 is not designed for those ancient pathetic devices?:)
I installed Sencha touch 2 on a server for testing and a lot of the examples also give “page not found errors” Will there be an update that fixes those issues?