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NativeScript 1.4 announcement

October 15, 2015 — by Valio Stoychev

NativeScript 1.4 is here. Please read the upgrade instructions.

What sets this release apart from the previous ones is that it reflects more than ever the way we think about the product. Once we deliver a certain set of functionality, we focus on perfecting the existing framework. You will not see new features baked into the latest version. Instead we polished many functionalities in response to users feedback. This is the result of working with a lot of developers and helping them deliver apps to their clients. Listening and responding to real developer feedback was always a core value for Telerik as a company and I’m sure you will be happy to work with this latest version of NativeScript. NativeScript is now more stable, more polished and battle tested framework. You can use NativeScript 1.4 in your production environment for building applications.

To learn more about the 1.4 and 1.3 releases please join us on the free online webinar we are hosting. We will love to chat with you over the 1hr course of the webinar.

Register now in our new and beautiful webinar registration page.

For the full Changelog please see our release notes.

During the last month there was a lot of interesting activity from the NativeScript community which I want to highlight here. First, in our forum there is a very interesting thread where you are sharing your experiences with NativeScript. We are very glad to hear all the positive feedback we are receiving from solid companies and developers from all around the world. You see what developers are saying about NativeScript here. If you are working on an app, please do share your experience with us - it is really encouraging for the team to read real developer stories. This is also an opportunity for you to get in touch with the team and get help for your project.

The next big thing worth highlighting are all the plugins that were created during the last several weeks. Since we introduced cocoapods support and gradle builds in 1.3 a plugin is really easy to be created. All this ofcourse encouraged a lot developers to extend NativeScript with existing native libraries and to provide native rich UI in NativeScript and to fill the missing gaps in the framework. There are now more than 50 plugins available for NativeScript on npmjs.org, here are the highlights:

DropDown component by Peter Staev


https://www.npmjs.com/package/nativescript-drop-down

GridView component by Peter Staev
The GridView displays data in separate cells, each cell representing one data item. For iOS wraps up UICollectionView and for Android wraps up GridView

https://www.npmjs.com/package/nativescript-grid-view

Background Upload plugin by Panayot Cankov
A cross platform plugin that provides background upload for iOS and Android.
https://www.npmjs.com/package/nativescript-background-http

WebSocket plugin by Nathanael Anderson
https://www.npmjs.com/package/nativescript-websockets

Spring Animation Plugin by Alex Ziskind
https://www.npmjs.com/package/nativescript-animation-spring

animation_spring.gif


IQKeyboardManager by TJ Van Toll
NativeScript wrapper for the popular IQKeyboardManager iOS framework, which provides an elegant solution for preventing the iOS keyboard from covering UITextView controls.
https://github.com/tjvantoll/nativescript-IQKeyboardManager

screenshot.gif

Sound plugin by John Bristow
Play a sound in your NativeScript app
https://www.npmjs.com/package/nativescript-sound

BarCode scanner by Eddy Verbunden
Scan QR/barcodes with a {N} app.
https://www.npmjs.com/package/nativescript-barcodescanner

Push Notifications plugin by Telerk
https://www.npmjs.com/package/nativescript-push-notifications


Toast UI plugin by Tobias Hennig

https://www.npmjs.com/package/nativescript-toast


Social Share plugin by TJ Van Toll

https://twitter.com/tjvantoll/status/616608542666010624

Snippets for VS Code and Sublime by Tsvetan Ganev
https://github.com/tsvetan-ganev/nativescript-sublime-snippets

https://github.com/tsvetan-ganev/nativescript-vscode-snippets

In October there will be several conferences that you can attend and hear about NativeScript.

  1. London, UK - visit the official Angular conference to see how to build native mobile applications using NativeScript and Angular 2
    There are also two meetups of the NativeScript Insiders group in Londing - http://www.meetup.com/NativeScript-London/

  2. Atlanta, GA - visit the ConnectJS conference and attend the following sessions:
    Building Native Mobile Apps with Javascript by Josh Jensen
    Expanding Your NativeScript App with Native Libraries by Stephen Feather

  3. Ofcourse do not forget to register for the NativeScript webinar