Titanium 1.2 updates: good news only for iPad developers (UPDATED)

[UPDATE: Fixed!  Thanks very much to the Appcelerator guys (esp Don Thorp [@donthorp]) for acting on this quickly once it came to their attention.  Just open up your Titanium Developer and you’ll be prompted to download 1.2.1, which now works correctly for importing existing projects.]

I really, really like Appcelerator’s Titanium platform. I hope that’s clear by now. So it pains me a bit to complain about something which I think is a really major failure. (On the other hand, I seem to be the only person harping on this, so maybe it’s not so major! :)) I’ll identify that failure below.

First, Titanium Mobile SDK 1.2 has been pushed out. I imagine it has bug fixes relevant to both Apple’s mobile platforms and Android, but really the spectacular update is support for the iPad (note: you’ll need iPhone SDK 3.2 from Apple, so go start that download now!) So congratulations to the Appcelerator team for that — it has the potential to be huge for them, considering the news cycle for the iPad is still so fresh. Well done! (Can’t wait to see it in action — still downloading the iPhone SDK!)

Titanium Developer — the application which Titanium developers use to create, import (!) and manage projects — has also been upgraded to 1.2. And here is the major failure: you still cannot import projects when running Developer in Windows or Linux. I just can’t believe this failure is now going to exist in a “major point” version. 1.1.2 was one thing, but 1.2 … come on guys. Is the problem really so hard to fix?

So we’re still at the point where if we want to recommend Titanium for Android development, and we want to be able to just tell would-be developers to download and import the KitchenSink to learn more about how Titanium works … well we can’t do that, because they can’t import anything. It all looks very mickey-mouse, very not ready for primetime, very alpha version, when Developer cannot accomplish this extremely basic function. Yes, there is a workaround, but it’s embarrassing to tell someone “don’t use the ‘import project’ project feature because it doesn’t work — instead create a new project with the same name, unzip KitchenSink in some folder, then copy all over all the unzipped files and folders into the folder you just created for the new project.” C’mon guys.

Here is my main take-away from this situation: Appcelerator’s paying customers are all doing iPhone/iPad development.

Never end a blog post on a sour note! I want to really congratulate Appcelerator for the momentum they have going right now, particularly in the iPhone/iPad arena, and thank them again for a fantastic product. I know it’s hard to cover all bases when rushing to get something out the door — I just think that a core feature of the Developer app, a feature exposed so clearly via the UI, really needs to be working as expected (and definitely shouldn’t fail silently, as it does.) Good luck moving forward!