NativeScript is a shiny new cross-platform mobile development framework that I'm exploring and comparing to existing frameworks. One common task that we have to do as developers is to connect mobile apps to far away data storage. These days Backend…
Have you been trying to run a NativeScript app in an iOS simulator other than iPhone 4s? There is a sorely missed parameter on the run and emulate commands that specifies what device to simulate. While the NativeScript team is busy working on more…
When developing a NativeScript app, you might run into a situation where you really need to use a native library that's you've already written, or a library that someone else has already made available as an open source project, for example. Should…
In this continuation of the topic of using NativeScript with Azure Mobile Services, I show how you can use the open sourced iOS library that the Azure team has put together in your NativeScript apps to access the full gamut of functionality that the…
So you've got your NativeScript app up and running and noticed that it looks a bit strange on the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus. What's going on? Why is the iPhone scaling my app up and not showing it in fully iPhone 6 glory? When you deploy your…
If you are coming from the web world, you'll find that NativeScript observables are a little different than the ES6 observables and observables found in pre ES6 day libraries like Knockout. The big difference is that instead of observing a property…
There are a few basic UI modules that come with NativeScript. Some of them, like the Label, offer a few simple features like styling and text wrapping, while the native iOS label allows you to do much more. Did you know that you could extend the…
Did you know that you could use your own fonts in NativeScript? You're not stuck with the default Helvetica that you see every label and button use out of the box. This post show you how to see what fonts are available on iOS devices, how to use…
You might be thinking that backgrounds are a pretty simple thing to set on your views, and you're right! NativeScript provides methods for us to set background images as element attributes in the XML as well as set backgrounds though CSS. However…
I wanted to build a little calculator app in NativeScript and make it resemble the iOS calculator. Not that we need another calculator out in the world, but I thought it would be a great way to show off some of NativeScript's less known abilities (at…
A navigation pattern for mobile apps that is still pretty hot at the time of this writing is a side drawer that playfully slides out like the one in the Telerik NEXT app. Or a navigation page that gets revealed as main content slides out of the way…
Let's face it, deploying to a device just to have the ability to debug your NativeScript app is so 4 months ago. I just wanted to write a quick entry on debugging a NativeScript app while running it on the iOS simulator. So hopefully searching for…
Here is a quick tip and a video on how to easily clean up you workspace while writing your NativeScript applications in Visual Studio Code. Related Resources Clutter Free NativeScript Development Video Tutorial It’s really easy to hide all those…
Larger projects will require you to keep your code well organized. Proper module referencing is key to moving files and folders around in your NativeScript apps. This post includes a video tutorial on common organization tasks you can perform to move…
or: How I learned to stop worrying and love writing NativeScript apps from scratch Our baby is all grown up and s/he wants to write nativescript apps without using the template! How does our baby do that and where does s/he start? Read on… Versions…
If we want to jump directly to a row in our ListView, there is a handy function in NativeScript called scrollToIndex. Sometimes we want a more natural scroll that animated the scrolling motion, this keeps our human brains more in tune with the list…
If you use or develop for iOS, you are very familiar with the swipe-to-delete move. Several built in iOS applications have this including email, notes, and reminders. The NativeScript ListView uses the iOS UITableView in the background, but it doesn…
If you’re just starting out with NativeScript and you love learning by watching videos, Alex Ziskind has course on Pluralsight to get you started. You can find the course here Course Introduction Course Description Want to learn how to build native…
Those of us that have been looking for a way to call in iOS environments while developing with JavaScript in the NativeScript framework have been SOL for a while. However, I am pleased to present a short and sweet solution here that saved my behind…
NativeScript is an open source project that keeps evolving with releases happening every couple of months. Perhaps you want to try out what's coming up in the next release, or perhaps you saw some way you can contribute to the project. Either way, I…
Has this ever happened to you? You create a new NativeScript project and then realize that you wanted to use TypeScript? Your options are: Delete the project and recreate it using the TypeScript flag. Delete all JavaScript files, add TypeScript to…
OAuth has been adopted my many organizations, large and small, as the (current) best standard for authenticating and authorizing their users. OAuth 2.0 being the latest iteration of the standard and it’s used to offload the burdensome security…
We’ve been hard at work getting the NativeScript OAuth 2 Plugin ready to work with Microsoft and Facebook accounts for a workflow that’s as streamlined as possible. The goal was to remove confusion and with the version 1.0 release, we’ve done just…
The latest version of NativeScript is version 2.2.1. Do you have the latest version of the CLI installed and your project upgraded? If not, then don’t worry, it’s not that difficult. Here is a video tutorial that shows you how to do just that…
You may ask, “What is live debugging?” For a long time NativeScript developers had to make a hard choice while developing applications. We had to choose between debugging or using LiveSync. We couldn’t do both. With the latest release, we now don’t…
Using Facebook login is pretty common in mobile apps today. There are many other third party authentication providers, but Facebook is extremely prevalent. With the nativescript-oauth plugin recently being updated, and the fact that I haven’t created…
What’s a FAB? This is a Floating Action Button that has been popularized by the Material Design paradigm. It’s a button that hovers over your content and provides a quickly accessible single function, and it’s no longer only for Android apps. Many…
NativeScript 2.5 just dropped and it has really awesome features like Chrome debugging and an improved run command. So I couldn’t wait to upgrade my existing installation. I’ve already written a post on upgrading and a video about the same, but I…
If you’re ready to take your animations in NativeScript to the next level, Alex Ziskind has just release another course on Pluralsight specifically for NativeScript and Angular animations. You can find the course here Course Introduction Course…
Folks learning NativeScript have historically had three places to get their learning – the docs section of NativeScript.org, community blog posts like this one, and big publishing houses, this includes printed books and video courses. NativeScript…
…and how is that related to plugins? When you create a native mobile application involving anything more advanced than just your standard out of the box user interface controls, you inevitably run into challenges around extending your app to handle…
TL;DR Yes! but… For a long time, NativeScript developers have been begging for the ability to animate height and width using standard animation techniques that are well documented. I’ll show you examples of how to achieve this right now, and tell you…
“Why is my ListView template binding not working?!!” You’re frustrated and you’re tearing your hair out. “It works on the web, but it doesn’t work here, in my NativeScript app! Why? I’ve gone over it with a fine-tooth comb, but still nothing!” If you…
This is a quick post just for anyone who’s looking for a .gitignore file to add to their NativeScript projects that they version using Git. At this point, none of the NativeScript out of the box templates generate a .gitignore file. This may be…
This may sound familiar to you. You've built an Angular web application for the browser, and then had to create a mobile application that has pretty much the same features. So you start from scratch, and maybe, just maybe, you can use some of the…
A popular approach in JavaScript APIs these days is to pass a string that matches a property name as a parameter to some function. These are sometimes called ‘magic strings’ and they are very code smelly. In this article and video we will fix this…
Do you manage your application state using the Flux pattern (now better knows as Redux, I suppose)? Well you should check it out since it will make your application state handling life much easier. @ngrx is a Redux inspired set of libraries for…
Have you ever written platform specific code in NativeScript, whether it was JavaScript or CSS? Did it look like a giant -- statement? Or maybe you even separated out your platform specific code into separate functions, but you still needed…
Close your eyes for a moment and imagine yourself creating a modal dialog for a web application. Ok, I know, there are more exciting things to imagine, but roll with it for a moment. Got it? Now imagine creating a modal dialog in a NativeScript…
Working on a team that has given me the experience to create production NativeScript and Angular applications, I’ve been in the trenches and have seen real world scenarios that someone might come across while building an app. Hi, I’m Sean Perkins…
By this time, you likely have already had the experience of adding font icons to your web or mobile application. You can add nice graphics to spice up your interfaces and you can style the graphics with CSS, since they are just fonts. Libraries like…
How do we secure our enterprise mobile applications? We’re happy to announce that we now have a video course that shows how to do just that. Securing enterprise applications has always been a challenge, and single sign-on used to be the holy grail…
We’re ready to create our new NativeScript app, but we just need to know how to do it. Many people that are coming to NativeScript after being web developers or from other frameworks like Cordova are initially just trying to be as productive as…
This video tutorial walks you through using a brand new feature in NativeScript version 4.1 - css gradients! CSS gradients have been on the NativeScript styling wish list for quite some time, and they have finally arrived! In this tutorial, I'll show…
This is another video tutorial in the series that looks into amazing new features in NativeScript version 4.1. This time I'm digging into the new event and trying it out in Core and Angular. Tired of having to use to get native UI element…
Mobile apps! They are ubiquitous in today’s world. JavaScript developers have been successfully using hybrid approaches to creating mobile apps for years. But the pace of mobile UX and the performance demands have skyrocketed, and hybrid apps, built…
This is another time-saving tip for NativeScript developers. If you aren't using NativeScript Core and NativeScript Angular snippets in Visual Studio Code, then you are missing out. In this short video tutorial on snippets, I show you which…
Let's say you are in a situation where you want to show the user the corresponding image when the user selects a particular SegmentedBar option in NativeScript Core. We'll use the widget to display the image, and to display the options. The…
JavaScript developers have a dirty secret: how we handle null and undefined variables in nested objects. It's no secret that as JavaScript developers we work with objects that often contain other nested objects and even arrays and primitive types…
You've been building your NativeScript app using pure JavaScript. Maybe ES2015 or ES2017, then you're transpiling to ES5 at build time. And now, after hearing about how amazing TypeScript is, and "everybody's doing it", you're finally ready to take…
What's a simple thing all developers really want from complex, network-bound mobile app? We want to find network related actions and errors as quickly as possible, without all the headaches of setting up proxies and certificates to sniff our HTTP…
In this series of written and video tutorials, I'll progressively improve the progress bar (see what I did there?) by adding JavaScript animation to its movement, and then using RxJS to animate it. TJ VanToll wrote an excellent post on building a…
After over a year of planning and waiting for a super stable version, it’s my pleasure to announce that together with the stable version 2 release of NativeScript-Vue, we've released a beginner level video course called NativeScript-Vue Introduction…
During development, I prefer using a local backend that I quickly spin up along with my NativeScript apps. Why? It's easy, it's offline, it gives me more control, and it allows me to reason about my app in a more realistic way during development…
Here I was trying to comment out a large block of XML markup in my NativeScript UI code, but I had another comment right in the middle of the code I was trying to comment. Here's how I was able to do it. Note: This technique can't be used in html…
Converting fetch to HttpClient to make API calls is pretty straightforward. But sometimes it's not done correctly, especially when abusing the async pipe. It may be beneficial to use HttpClient instead of the good old global fetch API that lives in…
You've built a mobile app. But is it secure? There are many resources out there for learning how to do great things with NativeScript, whether it's UI, or animations, or performance. These are all important things to know. There is one are that's…
The mysterious async/await combination has been permeating JavaScriptland the for a bit now. You can use it in NativeScript too, but you need this little trick to get it working. Async/await works for either NativeScript Core, NativeScript with…
The time that we've all been waiting for has finally come. Ok, maybe the time that I've been waiting for... Big News NativeScript-Vue finally got TypeScript support! Here is the pull request by Manuel Saelices that made it possible. This news is…
Using class components in NativeScript-Vue with TypeScript? You need to know these five things. Warning: strong personal opinions follow, but there is no swearing ;) Right Direction Class Component Scaffolding Five Things About Class Components in…
I'm excited to announce my latest project over at NativeScripting – NativeScript Vue and Vuex! This course provides an overvue of Vuex and looks at how we can apply it to our NativeScript Vue projects. What's Inside Throughout the course, we'll look…
Typically we bind the ListView and Repeater components to a JavaScript array in NativeScript, but it's not always clear when you should use a regular JavaScript array or ObservableArray. What is so observable about it anyway? That's what we're going…
How do you update a value field when using the RadDataForm in NativeScript? At the time of writing, you can't do it using any JavaScript API. In this short NativeScript tutorial, I'll show you a workaround. TL;DR If you prefer video, I cover how to…
In this NativeScript tutorial, we'll create an animated material design type of ripple effect on your buttons using JavaScript and CSS, and no external iOS or Android libraries needed. We use buttons for the demo, but you can apply the effect on…
NativeScript Vue Manual Routing Function Typing This tutorial will show you how to avoid TypeScript compilation errors when using NativeScript-Vue routing functions along with your TypeScript class-based components. TL;DR If you prefer a video…
NativeScript Angular keeps navigated components alive on a stack. This is great for performance since the framework doesn't have to work as hard to recreate the components that you might return to. However, sometimes you might need manual control…
Whether you're using NativeScript Core, NativeScript Vue, or NativeScript Angular, some core widget tricks are the same, including using a to separate out the sections of text in your Labels and Buttons. In this short NativeScript tutorial, we'll…
The verticalAlignment property doesn't work with Label text in Android in your NativeScript apps. So how do you vertically center text in a NativeScript Label on Android? This short tutorial will show you a workaround that will accomplish this. TL;DR…
Want to make your TextFields look more or less the same on iOS and Android? This tutorial will show you how to get rid of the bottom border of a TextField in a NativeScript Android application. TL;DR Here's a video for you if you prefer watching the…
Besides all the different events that you can listen for in NativeScript views, did you know that you can also create custom events? That's what we'll be doing in this tutorial! TL;DR Here's a video for you if you prefer a more visual tutorial…
By popular demand, in this tutorial, we'll be creating an animated bottom sheet that works on iOS and Android. TL;DR If you prefer watching a video of the tutorial, then here you go: Introduction This article is the third part in a series of…
In this tutorial, you'll learn how to create a bottom navigation bar with a cradle like effect that can be either dragged or clicked. The final result will look something like this.. Cradle Tab Bar Getting Started To start with, we begin with a…
In this tutorial, I'll show you how to get those clean line shadows that you can fully control in intensity, size, and color, just by using CSS. And they will look pretty much the same on iOS and Android. TL;DR If you prefer going through a video…
Have you always dreamed of being able to create shapes in NativeScript UIs? In this NativeScript tutorial, you'll learn 2 ways of creating shapes in NativeScript applications. TL;DR Here's a video for you if you prefer watching the tutorial…
In this tutorial, we'll be creating a Floating Action Button (FAB) in a NativeScript Core application using just CSS and no third-party libraries. TL;DR Check out the video below if you prefer a more visual way of learning. Introduction About two…
Do you need to include social authentication in your mobile apps? In this NativeScript tutorial, we're using OAuth2 and adding Google login to a simple app. TL;DR Here's a video version of this tutorial on my YouTube channel. You can find a lot more…
In this NativeScript tutorial, I'll show you five native iOS properties you can alter to create any kind of shadow in your iOS NativeScript apps. TL;DR If you prefer a video of the tutorial, here it is: Introduction In NativeScript 6, elevation for…
When it comes to writing code for your NativeScript application, there are different software architectures or design patterns that you can use to structure the code. In this article, we'll look at two of these: MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel) and Clean…
In this tutorial, you'll learn how to create a bottom navigation bar with a sliding color animation. This tutorial will be focused more on creating the custom tab bar rather than how to use the component. Result Getting Started Lets begin with a…
Hey Everybody! Today I’m going to show you how to do some automated unit testing with NativeScript using Azure Pipelines. Notes: This post assumes you are using Azure DevOps to host your repository, but if you are hosting on Bitbucket, GitHub…
Are you already learning NativeScript or about to join the community and start learning this framework that lets you build native iOS and Android app with JavaScript? Here are some seven useful things you should know. TL;DR Here's a video version of…
Hey Everybody! Have you been using to run multiple versions of NativeScript? Have you been running out of disk space? Well today I’m going to show you something interesting I found if you use to run multiple versions of NativeScript as seen in this…
A few months ago I wrote the blog post Automatic NativeScript App Deployments with fastlane showing how to set up fastlane for NativeScript apps. Now, this article takes it a step forward: running the fastlane build process in a GitHub action. Here…
Hey Everybody! I recently wrote a post on automated unit testing with NativeScript using Azure Pipelines. After some requests I am now writing a more detailed iOS post. :) This post will be specifically for iOS. If you'd like to see how to setup…
Here is another way you could implement animations in your NativeScript applications. If you are using NativeScript Angular, you have the ability to use Angular's animation system in your app. This should be identical to the one you would use in a…
Recently I ran into a gotcha with using 'routerExtensions.back()' in a project and wanted to share the problem with you all as well as the solution I used. The Problem In my app I have a detail page, and an edit page. So I need to navigate to the…
Displaying images that are behind a protected API is a very common use case when building web and mobile applications, thus creating the need for a clean and easy way to be able to display these types of images using Nativescript's component. The…
Do you have a large list of data in your mobile app with search functionality? Are you using a debounce function? You should! Let me show you how! 😁 The Problem Have you ever been typing in a search bar and had a typo so you immediately hit…
In this article, I want to discuss some ways of passing complex data between routed components in NativeScript applications based on the Angular framework. There are several ways to pass data in Angular applications and I just want to go through some…
RTL (right-to-left) and LTR (left-to-right) layout support is pretty common for apps catering to an international audience that supports multiple languages. However, building layouts that supports both orientation can be a challenge without the right…
A while ago I finished one more project with NativeScript. During the period of work with this framework I've accumulated some amount of solutions which are quite steadily used in almost every project I had worked on. Each of them allows to quickly…
In mobile app development, one of the most effective engagement tools is notifications. Notifications allow you to increase app retention and improve user experience. Notifications might even be a core requirement for apps such as social media and…