NativeScript 6.3.0 Released

NativeScript 6.30 has a couple cool new things; but better yet it fixes several issues that can will affect your users if you are using 6.2.x lets look at them...

Some of the fixes include instability during android's switching of applications and resuming it. An issue with unloading views on Android. Out of memory situation on Android, and dialog fixes for iOS. In addition to several important build fixes that appear to solve a lot of build HMR related issues. Overall this release is worth upgrading to for just the bug fixes alone.

Core Modules

NativeScript is getting a new CSS parser; unfortunately it is not enabled by default in 6.3; but based on a PR should be enabled by default in 6.4. If you would like to enable this in your app to see how much faster it can parse your css; you do so by editing the packages.json file that ships with the application and adding a new key called "cssParser" and set it to "css-tree". The valid options are "rework" (current parser) and also "nativescript" which was the original css parser.

We had a couple awesome community PR's this month the first by Eduardo Speroni adds requestAnimationFrame as a supported function. And the second by Shailesh Lolam  add dialog sizing (width & height properties) to the modal dialogs on iOS.

And finally to round up our new core module features; Modal dialogs now have all the same CSS properties applied to them to allow better styling. In addition to the normal properties, a new .ns-modal class is applied.

CLI

The CLI team has fixed several outstanding bugs; including several webpack hmr issues. This also includes Node 13 and Android API 29 compatibility.

V8

I'm going to create this new v8 Section, because Android and soon iOS will both be using the same v8 engine. v8 was upgraded to v7.8 which adds:

• Faster object destructuringconst {x, y} = object; This is now as fast as the normal ES5 const x = object.x, y = object.y;
• Lazy source positioning; which can save 1 - 2.5% of memory; basically instead of storing all source code lines for when errors occur; it recalculates it when it needs it.
• Faster RegEx
• Several Wasm improvements

Android

The Android team kept busy this month;

• Fixed some Kotlin issues
• Android Signal 1 & 11 are now captured
• Fixed a worker issue
• Upgraded to V8 7.8 (See v8 section)

IOS

• Upgraded to WebKit 13.2
• Several metadata fixes
• Fixed a worker issue
• Fixed debugger not working issue
• Fixed discardUncaughtJsExceptions issue
  
  A lot of changes to the new v8 version of the iOS runtime that is still in alpha testing to eventually replace the JSCore version... It appears the iOS v8 version is shaping up to be an awesome release.

Updating NativeScript

To get updated; you first need to do:
npm i -g nativescript@latest

To update a project; you need to do the following:

Latest Runtimes:
tns platform remove android && tns platform add android@latest
tns platform remove ios && tns platform add ios@latest

Latest Core modules:
npm r tns-core-modules --save
npm i tns-core-modules@latest --save

To install Webpack support:
npm i nativescript-dev-webpack@latest --save-dev

To install latest NativeScript Angular plugin
npm i nativescript-angular@latest --save
You will then need to install the actual angular bits; which as of this post v6 is currently supported.

The addition of t additional analytics/tracking to the CLI reminded me; you can disable it permanently; if you value your privacy by doing:
tns usage-reporting disable && tns error-reporting disable