sencha-logoAwesome news today–a new version of Sencha Fiddle was just released! This version (1.1) has a bunch of new goodies included in it, some of which really add benefit to the tool.

I’m not going to rehash all the features (you can read those here), but I’ll highlight the…er…highlights 🙂

Improved Search

The search in the prior version of Sencha Fiddle was pretty basic. It worked, but could only get you so far. The updates to search in 1.1 make it incredibly easier to search by multiple criteria, as well as controlling the sort order of the results. You can still search by simple keywords, but the advanced search really allows for some more fine-tuning of results.

In the future, I’d like to see some enhancements in the way of being able to clear search criteria, as well as even being able to save search criteria sets…but for the time being, the new search is a very big improvement!

Downloadable Fiddles

I think this enhancement is especially nice. Fiddle 1.1 now includes the ability to download your fiddle as a standalone “app” of sorts. Basically you get a zip archive that includes an HTML file, an app.js, as well as any other files that you’ve created within your fiddle. Fire up the HTML file in your favorite browser, and voila, you have a portable fiddle!

Shortcuts!!!

I think most developers live and die by keyboard shortcuts, so these are a very nice improvement. What I find most cool is that these use a custom EventDomain (which I’ve experimented with a bit here and here) to manage the key presses. I like it when Sencha devs highlight this kind of stuff, so here’s hoping Mitchell blogs in more detail with some code (hint hint).

Tags

Are tags new? I can’t remember. Whether they are or not, you can now attach multiple tags to your fiddles. This, of course, is pretty dang useful for searching.

On a cool factor note, the tags editor is pretty slick. Not only are tags auto-suggested based on your input, but the field control is using one of those nice Facebook-style multi-value entry thing-ys (technical term, just look at the screenshot). It’s shiny, so I like it.

Control

 

 

Comments

Finally, the ability to add comments to individual fiddles has been added, and can be either public or private. While I’m not sure I’ll use them a lot, I could see how they would be dead-handy to have on fiddles used for support tickets or for teams of developers that use Fiddle as a collaboration tool.

Wrapping Up

That’s all for me. Overall, I’m extremely pleased with the new features that are being added to Fiddle at regular intervals. Mitchell Simoens is doing a really nice job with this project, and is super-supportive and responsive to bug reports, feature requests, and the like. Well done sir, and keep up the awesome work!