Back to Blog Home
← all posts

Announcing NativeScript 2.3

September 20, 2016 — by Valio Stoychev

Just in time for the NativeScript Developer Day event we are glad to announce the immediate availability of our 2.3 release. Get the bits here!

360+ plugins, 8k+ GitHub stars, 20k+ followers on twitter, 250,000+ npm downloads, loved by the Angular community (discussion happening right now to rename NativeScript to Angular Native :)), iOS10, FlexBox, Android 7, WebStom, VS Code, TypeScript Security, LiveEdit - this is what NativeScript 2.3 is.

We’ve come a long way since our initial release last year. We are truly excited to work with an awesome community and we can’t wait to see applications will be build with NativeScript 2.3.

Let's deep dive into all the things we shipped with 2.3.

iOS 10, XCode8 support

The big news from the last week in the mobile space was the announcement of iPhone 7 and the official release of iOS10. From several months now we were releasing NativeScript compatible builds with the beta versions of iOS 10 and now I’m please to announce that our framework supports the official build of iOS 10. We promised you 0-day support and I’m happy that we managed to deliver on this promise (the actual bits were deployed last Tuesday on npm are were available to anyone!). Not only the framework support iOS10, but the NativeScript tooling (the CLI) supports the newest version of XCode8. Choosing NativeScript do not leave you behind the native platform changes and improvements.

We’ve prepared a sample application that shows how to use one of the iOS10 new frameworks - iMessage. You can check the sample code here.

Enjoy full API access to everything the Apple team put into iOS10!

Angular 2 bits are now final

It is a monumental milestone for the Angular community. The Angular 2 bits are now official. Brad Green and Angular team announced this last week on a special event. You can read more about this on our dedicated blog post, but we are happy to let you know that NativeScript works with the latest Angular 2 bits and you can create mobile apps with Angular 2 and NativeScript right now.

We’ve prepared a list of 60 code samples that shows how to use NativeScript with Angular2, they will help you deep dive into the code really quick.

FlexBox layout (experimental preview)

To give you even more layout options in NativeScript and to integrate another web skill in to NativeScript we are adding support for FlexBox layout. If you have web experience I know you are going to love this new layout!

With 2.3 we are releasing a preview version and we aim to make it production-ready for 2.4. Please check the repo for the demo application!

Live Edit (experimental preview)

From a long time we are working towards making the time between code changes and app preview shorter. Our live sync is getting better with every release, but it is still reloading the app when a JavaScript file is changed. In certain cases this can be slow. With 2.3 we are introducing LiveEdit which is in experimental state, but it will allow you to see the JavaScript/TypeScript code changes in less than a second on iOS. We still have work to do to enable it for Android, but we are working on that as well.

Learn more about how to use LiveEdit in the GitHub issue, watch the video below how productive you will become!

WebStorm integration

Thanks to @iguissouma you can now use NativeScript in WebStorm. The integration is work in progress, but please give it a try and send your feedback!

Web Workers

For 2.3 the team worked on the Web Workers support and we are very near for the first release. A drop of the first bits will be done in the next several weeks, before the 2.4 release. You can follow the progress here.

Survey

To help make NativeScript event better, please fill the survey we are running. The results of the survey will be shared with everyone in the community!

Please let us know if you have any comments i the discussion form below!