A few minor issues and thoughts

[Eddy Verbruggen]

Hi guys,

First of, I wanted to share two minor issues I found while finding my way in NativeScript land. I've attached a screenshot for both issues.

1. When building in the Cloud AppBuilder, the dialog mentions the AppBuilder companion app, it took me a little while to find I actually had to use the NativeScript companion app (great app by the way!). This is probably simply because it's all very fresh, but it does puzzle early adopters.
2. This getting started document asks you to change the color of a button: change lightGrapColor to lightBlueColor. After livesyncing this change, the app no longer renders the button and no error is shown. Because developers will likely make lots of mistakes when Javascripting native code this is very inconvenient. It would be very handy to have some kind of error feedback. By the way, I changed it to orangeColor and it worked great ;)

I hope one of the main targets of NativeScript is to be able to 'write once run anywhere' as much as possible - so developers only need to dive into platform specifics if they want to do something very, well.. specific.
This is likely where third party modules will be playing a major role. Very much like Cordova plugins, but I expect them to be easier to tweak after adding them to your project.

I will be playing some as I am truly exited about this project!

Thanks and keep up the great work,
Eddy

[Valio]

Hello Eddy,

Thank you very much for this feedback!

You are correct - we received the feedback from other developers too that having two companion apps (one for hybrid and one for NativeScript) can be misleading. We are now thinking how we can make only one companion app, or if we can't use a single application we will make sure that any of the apps can open the target project without errors.

As for the "write once run anywhere" - yes this is our goal. Developers do not need to know the native platform specifics to develop their applications with NativeScript. I'll write soon a post here explaining our vision regarding this and will be grateful for any comments on the topic, because I think this will be one of the most important technical decisions we will make in NativeScript.

Please keep us posted on any thoughts you have :)