I took a bit of a break from reporting on NativeScript things; but guess what, I'm BACK!!!
Well, looks like I was on the ball again this time. 😉 4.1.0 has been released to NPM, and it is HOT!
Version 4.0 was a great release and all; had a lot of cool changes. But 4.1 is an awesome release building upon that great release and if you haven't upgrade to the NativeScript 4 yet; this is what you have been waiting for! Thank you Progress.
First of all the item that we have been all waiting for if you do any Android development; they have updated the Android V8 engine to pretty much the latest stable released version. So we jumped from v8 v5.5 to v6.6. Now that might not seem like a large change but the number of changes in the v8 engine from v5 to v6 are incredibly large. We now have the brand new JavaScript optimizing engine (Turbo Fan); the new optimized Garbage Collection engine, pretty much full ES6 support ; and so many other countless optimized features -- I could dedicate a post to all the cool things we now have access to in Android. In a nutshell this v8 is now considerably faster. In fact one of the tweets you might have seen is how much faster this version even starts the application. Always awesome for our customers to have the app startup now almost twice as fast. For all you iOS fans; v4.0.0 of NativeScript upgraded the JavaScript core to pretty close to the latest, so now both sides are running the state of the art JavaScript engines..
In addition to that awesome change that is totally worth the upgrade by itself - we can now use Angular 6 and Webpack 4! I'm sure many of you will be very happy to see these.
Now that I'm done drooling over all this new found speed and these two other awesome feature updates; lets run down some of the other new features and fixes that you get for free when you upgrade:
- Android: "in" names space is now fixed. Prefix it with a
$so that it is $in.rest.of.namespace. - Android: Java ByteArray to ArrayBuffer support was improved to support more types of ByteArray's.
- Android: Latest Gradle now used (and a bug fixed against it).
- Android: Several Console fixes; including release mode no longer logs.
- Android: Fixed JNI crash
- Android: Debug tools are and LiveSync fixes.
- Android: Android P fixes!
- Android: ReturnKey no longer fires twice
- Android: Transition no longer crashes
- iOS: Console fixes
- iOS: Inspector port no longer times out quickly
- iOS: Flexbox fixes
- iOS: getImageAsync() added
- iOS: searchbar and listview sizing fixes
- All: Modal dialog fixes
- All: Navigation fix
- All: LayoutChanged event added
- All: css; linear-gradient support
- All: File System; get file size
- All: TabView font size
- All: Read XML from Bundles
- Angular: Angular 6 Support!
- Angular: router state should no longer crash the app in an invalid state
- Webpack: Webpack 4 Support!
- Webpack: XML Loading support
- Webpack: Android Compression
- CLI: Supports driving more than one iOS simulator
- CLI: Support Java 10
- CLI: Full application templates (Beta)
- CLI: Allow native Objective C source as part of plugins.
- CLI: iOS wifi driving should work again.
What do you think; I think this is a Rock'n awesome release, thank you to the different development teams (and community members) who contributed to this release!
First of all to upgrade is done is a couple steps:
> npm install -g nativescript@latest
> npm install tns-core-modules@latest --save
Next try the new update command or you can manually run the commands below
> tns update
For Android:
> tns platform remove android
> tns platform add android@latest
For iOS
> tns platform remove ios
> tns platform add ios@latest
Then you can type tns info and verify that everything says 4.1.x
Common Issues:
- None so far. 🙂