It is only two months after we released the first public version of NativeScript, but we got tons of positive feedback already on the work we have done so far. We have 3,000 stars on GitHub, more than 1,500 followers on Twitter (@NativeScript) and our public NativeScript forum is quite popular these days. This helps us a lot in validating that we are on the right track and we are working hard to meet expectations. I hope that with each release, you'll feel more and more confident that NativeScript is the best choice for cross-platform mobile app development.
With the release today, we are shipping some fundamental features that I’m sure will be appreciated by every mobile developer. As a reminder, thanks to our 0-day support for new OS we support the freshly released iOS8.3 and even the still not released beta version of iOS8.4! Goes without saying, we also support the Android’s latest Lollipop 5.0 release.
To get started with the new bits, please read our getting started with NativeScript article. If you have an app with using an older version of the framework, please read our guide how to update to NativeScript 1.0.
Here is the quick look at what we are shipping today:
Lets start with the Telerik NEXT conference application.
This is the official app for the TelerikNEXT conference which underway in Boston (May 3-5). You can download the application from App Store or Google Play.
If you already installed the app and you are blown away from its performance and UX, you probably want to browse the source code of the app and see how it is done. Then look no further: the source code is in our GitHub organization https://github.com/NativeScript/sample-TelerikNEXT.
The next application is called Friends, and it shows what you can do by integrating NativeScript with the powerful Telerik Platform.
The application is thoroughly documented in an article on the Telerik Platform, but here is the short list of the features that are showcased in the Friends sample app:
You can browse its source code here:
https://github.com/NativeScript/sample-Friends
I hope these two new examples will give you enough insights about what is possible now with NativeScript. We will enhance this sample and will add several new ones with our next release of NativeScript which is scheduled for mid-June.
Lets start with my favorite feature from this release,
If this sounds interesting, you would definitely find it worth reading the deep-dive blog post by @KirilStanoev dedicated entirely on the topic: Introduction to resolution specific Views for your native mobile apps.
The next feature, I want to tell you about the option to use dp-specific images.
As explained in the previous section, different devices have different form factors and different DP. This means you can’t use a single image for all form factors because it will look small on devices with higher DPI ratio and will look big on devices with smaller DPI ratio. There is a very good explanation of the problem as part of the Android documentation.
AngularJS by Google is by no means the most popular open source framework to web developers. In the last year, a lot of work has been done towards making this library prepared for mobile applications. You can read more about AngularJS 2.0 here.
In the last few months, we have been working closely with the team to help them enable their abstractions to support non-DOM environments. This is a topic we will explore a lot more in the next NativeScript release. Here is screencast video of what we are able to do now. Read more in this blog: Angular 2.0 Running in a Native app using NativeScript.
The focus in our next release is to further improve the developer experience and to enable even more app scenarios based on our flexible architecture. Here are the links to the issue details that we will work on:
Support for 3rd-party static libraries in iOS
Support for NativeScript plugins
Implement cross-platform push notifications module
Support for LiveSync inside CLI
Optimizations in Android Build time
Add support for iOS extensions and enable AppleWatch support
Enable error reporting inside applications
I hope this gives you enough reasons to start building an app with NativeScript. We'd love to hear your feedback. Keep in touch with us on twitter @NativeScript or visit our forum and talk with us.
Valentin Stoychev (@ValioStoychev) for long has been part of Telerik and worked on almost every UI suite that came out of Telerik. Valio now works as a Product Manager and strives to make every customer a successful customer.