It has been a long road since I first started with the just freshly released v0.90 slightly over a year ago. I saw a product that was brand new, raw, full of life and it offered a huge amount of potential. I decided that even though it wasn't nearly as popular as other recently released next generation product, ReactNative; that the underlying design of NativeScript was a much better foundation. So, I took a chance and decided to use NativeScript for all my projects. I am very grateful for Telerik open sourcing the entire stack, it has not only allowed me to see what geniuses the entire Telerik team is, but it has eliminated any concern of using this stack for well into future.
Now with the 2.0 release ,the future for NativeScript is even brighter. So many new features, so many existing features honed to be even better! This is a awesome release!
Some stats; In just the common core modules, we have had over 2,500 different commits since v0.90 by 40 different authors, of which over 1/3 of the authors are totally independent developers like me. In addition, when I started we had maybe a handful of plugins, according the the http://plugins.nativescript.rocks/ we are up to over 150 different addons of which were made by over 45 different authors. Not bad for a open source project no one had even heard of at the beginning of March of 2015...
The newest and biggest feature being release with version 2.0 is the Angular 2 support. Several of my fellow compatriots, Nathan Walker & T.J. VanToll and Burke Holland have created some amazing things with Angular 2.0 and NativeScript. If you are an Angular 2 fan, check them out.
Some of the other cool brand new features in v2.0 are;
- CSS Z-Index & RGB w/ Alpha support, Awesome!
- Android 6 Permission support
- Normal component properties (like orientation) can now be set via CSS
- CSS 3 Animations, Sweet!
- Android Widget support
- And several dozen additional bugs and feature were implemented.
Now to install this awesome new release in four simple steps:
- Install the new version of the NativeScript command line
- npm install -g nativescript
- Remove the existing platform
- tns platform remove android
AND/OR - tns platform remove ios
- tns platform remove android
- Add the platform(s) you need
- tns plaform add android
AND/OR - tns platform add ios
- tns plaform add android
- Install the common core modules
- npm install tns-core-modules@latest --save