New! Hot! NativeScript!

The NativeScript engineering team has been firing on all cylinders to get version 1.3 out the door, and it was delivered this week with all the appropriate fanfare. The changes, enhancements, and overall awesome sauce are all described in this blogpost, but the overall idea is best captured by a meme:



There has been a lot of community buzz around this release, and several folks from Twitter have chimed in as well:

What we'd like to tell you about today, however, or to remind you in case you didn't notice earlier, is that along with NativeScript 1.3, we also released the brand new NativeScript Getting Started Guide.

This guide, a collaboration between Developer Relations team members, the NativeScript engineering team, our Developer Experts community, and Telerik's great technical writing professionals, aims to help onboard new users to NativeScript in a friendly way, while encouraging a deep dive into the way the NativeScript runtime works.

The guide is structured as a series of exercises that walk you through the creation of an app to manage your grocery list. By the end of the guide, your app will include:

• registration
• login
• create a grocery list
• add items
• delete items in a cross-platform way (the delete mechanism looks different whether on Android or iOS)
• share your list using the Social Sharing plugin

Soon after its release, the Groceries app and Getting Started Guide was used by an enterprising hackathon team from Northeastern University at HackMIT, one of the largest student hackathons. The team created the "FridgeBouncer" mobile app for iOS and Android, extending the Groceries app by integrating a database of typical food expiration dates and matching photos taken with the app of various perishables. Coupled with the Clarifai API which tags photo elements, the app essentially creates a check-in system for perishables entering a refrigerator, flagging each item when it is past its peak freshness. We loved this idea and awarded the team the Progress/Telerik top prize for a NativeScript integration. Well done!

A great deal of care was put into the crafting of the Groceries app that you progressively build as you go through the guide. We are working on enhancing it as well as ​periodically updating the guide so that we can showcase as many interesting things you can do with NativeScript as we can.  At the same time, we have tried to implement best practices in the codebase, so that you can use the structure of the app to inspire you to create your own apps in the future. We welcome your feedback and look forward to the exciting apps you will be building using NativeScript!

There are more learning resources as well all fresh and new for you!

Videos

Several video interviews were recently conducted in various venues where we participated in conferences. Sam Basu introduces NativeScript at That Conference:



Jen Looper follows up with some demos:


 
Sam explains some more:


 
Emil Öberg shows how to get started with NativeScript in his Summer of NativeScript at Uppsala.js in Sweden.

Podcasts

Don't care for videos but still want to listen along? Sam Basu also recorded a podcast for DotNet Rocks.

Lists

Looking for a good list on resources to learn this framework: John Bristowe's Awesome List of NativeScript Resources is a great place to start.

Articles

While attending conferences, we often field questions about Telerik products that inspire blogposts. After our workshop at That Conference, for example, we had a whole laundry list to answer, so John Bristowe compiled them here.

Sam Basu recently published two great articles specific to .NET developers interested in getting on board: NativeScript for .NET Developers and Building a NativeScript UI for .NET developers.

There is more content on NativeScript nowadays than you can shake a stick at. My advice is to put the stick down and start coding! Start with the Getting Started Guide and you'll be up and running in no time. And stay tuned for more great stuff from the NativeScript team!