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This is the second part of the Monetize your NativeScript apps with AdMob blog. In part one I discussed how you can easily access and use the native API of a native framework in JavaScript, taking the AdMob library for iOS as an example. To do that, you only needed the existing AdMob documentation in combination with a few simple rules to translate the Objective-C API calls to JavaScript. The popular mobile platforms, however, are two - iOS and Android. So, it would be fair if I cover Android as well. Moreover, further in this article as things get a more interesting and we are close to having a cross-platform AdMob usage, I will show you what’s the recommended way of separating and isolating the native API calls in a NativeScript project. So, let’s begin.
Get a jump start on your NativeScript iOS and Android mobile application development in a new quickstart course.
There are three reasons for the NativeScript framework to exists - native UX, performance and a cleaner and easier programming model for cross-platform mobile applications.
As we know, NativeScript CLI is a Node.js application. This brings the questions like "which versions of Node.js can and should I use" or "how long particular Node.js version is supported." To answer these questions, it is useful to know the life cycle of Node.js. Please, take a minute to check the project wiki which explains it in a single graphic. With it in mind, the NativeScript team decided to support the LTS branches and, if possible, the "current stable" branch.
With the latest release of NativeScript you can use the huge amount of icon fonts available on the web inside your native mobile application. This works cross-platform, for both iOS and Android and is as simple as placing the font in the “app/fonts” folder and declaring the icon you want to use in the UI. The NativeScript framework is doing its magic behind the scenes so you don’t need to worry on which OS you run. This is just one those things that make your life easier and is helping you to reuse your existing skills/resources. (using CSS, native libraries, JavaScript code and AngularJS skills are the other things that we make available in NativeScript). So why is this a big deal and why it is a best practice to use a font instead of an image file to display an icon?
The whole world goes mobile, so are the software trends. But what’s the reason to create a mobile app after all? Well, surely, when things get serious, after the “it’s just for tests and fun” phase, it’s all about the money. You can create an app for the employees of your company or for the employees of somebody else (B2E, B2B). In this case your company benefits directly from the services you provide to its employees, or you take a commission for the app you create. But if your customers are the end-users (B2C) or if you create an app for a business customer (B2B) that will sell it to the masses, then you should surely be aware of the different app monetization methods where two of the main ones are in-app purchases and mobile ads. Today, we will talk about mobile ads and how you can enable them in your NativeScript application using the Google AdMob service and SDKs. This article will focus on iOS and in the next part we will cover the Android platform.
1.5 is a special release for NativeScript as it marks a major milestone - providing NativeScript developers with the tools to make them a lot more productive. There are several major and important features added in this release that will skyrocket your developer experience.
If you weren’t able to join us for our 1.4 release webinar, the video is now available on YouTube. The webinar includes demos of the latest features of our 1.3 and 1.4 releases, including animations, UI for NativeScript updates, Angular 2.0 support, and a whole lot more.
A new component joins the Telerik UI for NativeScript party: welcome RadListView and its powerful set of features directly coming from the native Telerik UI for iOS and Telerik UI for Android counterparts.
NativeScript 1.4 is here. Please read the upgrade instructions.
What sets this release apart from the previous ones is that it reflects more than ever the way we think about the product. Once we deliver a certain set of functionality, we focus on perfecting the existing framework. You will not see new features baked into the latest version. Instead we polished many functionalities in response to users feedback. This is the result of working with a lot of developers and helping them deliver apps to their clients. Listening and responding to real developer feedback was always a core value for Telerik as a company and I’m sure you will be happy to work with this latest version of NativeScript. NativeScript is now more stable, more polished and battle tested framework. You can use NativeScript 1.4 in your production environment for building applications.
Animations were the single most requested feature in our idea portal, so I think it's safe to say that animations landing in our 1.3 release was kind of a big deal. Now that animations are here, let's look at how to use NativeScript's new animation APIs, and how to create some practical effects you can add to your apps.
There is so much new content around NativeScript that we wanted to do a round-up of everything that's new and hot in the community. Take a look!
Last week, amongst many new things, Apple announced an update to the Apple TV. It now runs on a new operating system named tvOS and includes an app store allowing third-party apps. These apps can be developed using many frameworks and concepts quite similar to iOS ones (Foundation, UIKit and CoreGraphics), but also some new APIs like TVServices.
We were eager to find out if it was possible to run NativeScript on this new platform.
NativeScript 1.3 introduces two significant improvements to your development workflow for targeting iOS and Android:
Integration with CocoaPods for iOS development
Switch to Gradle for developing {N} projects when targeting Android
In this blog post, I’ll be covering our switch to Gradle when targeting Android and how to update your development environment to support this change.
NativeScript 1.3.0 is already here packed and stacked with a bunch of improvements. One of these improvements is the ease of use of CocoaPods. For those of you who don’t know CocoaPods, it is the dependency manager for Swift and Objective-C project. It allows you to easily take an open source GitHub repo and add a reference to the library that it produces.
With NativeScript 1.3.0, you can easily take a pod and use it for the iOS part of your NativeScript projects working only with the NativeScript CLI, without touching Xcode. What it more, a pod can be easily turned into a NativeScript npm plugin.
You've got questions and we've got answers! In this blog post, we tackle some of the questions about NativeScript you've asked us over the past few weeks.
NativeScript 1.3 is now officially available for download! If you have an app using 1.2 or an older version please read the upgrade instructions.
With this release we added more stability, more speed and several major features to NativeScript. NativeScript framework is now more mature and we are sure that NativeScript is your best bet for your mobile strategy. To be inline with the latest announcements from Apple,we do also support tvOS, and we would like to thank the Apple team for including all the tech we needed as a part of tvOS! A blog post is coming next week on the #tvOS topic.
Telerik Analytics allows you to get insight into:
Since iOS 8, Apple has made various aspects of the iOS available for 3rd-party developers to plug into. Those include plugging your own custom keyboard for your apps, or creating a widget for the iOS notification center.
Today, we will go through the steps needed to create a Today widget in the iOS notification center, but since we will be using the NativeScript framework to do so, it will be all in JavaScript, rather than in Swift/Objective-C.
Two months in and the Summer of NativeScript has reached nearly 50 meetups across 14 countries and 6 continents. If you haven't held a meetup don't despair—you can still be part of the fun. We're leaving the signup form open through September. If you sign up to hold up a meetup sometime this year, we'll still send you a NativeScript t-shirt and a pack of NativeScript stickers.
One of the biggest and greatest enhancements that arrived in iOS 9 (if not the biggest!) undisputedly is the deep-linking capabilities now open to the developers. Using the Spotlight search, your end-users can now search the contents of your app even if your app is not installed on their devices, granted that other users are already your app and browse the same content. Or, you can set some of the app contents to be private and available in the search only for the respective users.
Of course, these search APIs are available in NativeScript, and today we are going to implement a NativeScript app that provides deep-linking capabilities. Read on to learn how to do this.
In this blog post I will share a simple example, created by one of the senior developers in the team Alex, which was inspired by an animated GIF in a tweet:
So we decided to dogfood our own animations and to see how easy it will be implement this in NativeScript in a cross-platform way. It turned out to be quite easy - just a few lines of code.
Yes - the meme above sums it all. You asked a lot about a cross-platform native SideDrawer component and I’m happy that we just delivered it with the massive 1,2 release several weeks ago.
With support for plugins your NativeScript apps can now leverage an entire ecosystem of native iOS and Android frameworks and SDKs.
The trace module in NativeScript provides a powerful and flexible set of functions to help you discover what's happening under-the-covers with your application. It's like the Konami Code for debugging the issues you may have. In this blog post, we explore the trace module and its capabilities to help you build robust NativeScript apps.
NativeScript latest bits are now live and you can enjoy several bug fixes in the tooling and in the iOS and Android runtimes.
We were also able to put one new features - this is the support of iOS Sumulators as part of our LiveSync feature. With the 1.2 release you were only able to see immediate changes on a real iOS device, now you will be able to see your latest changes whe working with the simulators.
This post will go through the process of creating an Android jar library which will then be referenced from within a custom NativeScript plugin.
It’s been an exciting release cycle for the NativeScript team. We just published our first official release in May and since then there has been an insane amount of community activity. There are now more than 4k stars on Github, over 300 issues, 260+ forum threads, and more than 20 plugins have been created by the community. Did I mentioned the new G+ NativeScript group? We are already working with the first companies to prepare their apps on the app stores. If you are working on an app - please let us know - we are eager to see what you are building!
Telerik UI for NativeScript is suite of native UI components that adds a lot of advanced features on top of the default UI components we are shipping in the NativeScript framework. Telerik as a company has a long history of delivering such UI components that range from Lists, Data Visualization, Data Input for various development platforms. For NativeScript the ambitious goal is to provide the same rich range of components that will make your app look professional and will enable you to stand-out from your competitors by providing the best UX and performance. It is important to note that this suite comes with professional support and 24 hour guaranteed response time and unlimited support tickets.
Between npm modules and NativeScript plugins, which are nothing more than npm modules with the ability to use native code and libraries, you have now have a large collection of modules and libraries that you can leverage in your NativeScript apps. In this article you'll see several examples of how to make this happen.
And what’s in there actually?
Applications written with web means such as JavaScript and CSS are usually taken as web or hybrid. With NativeScript we enable these web means allowing you to write in your favorite language (JavaScript or TypeScript - the choice is yours) achieving great, fast-performing native apps. But, in the dawn of NativeScript and even now when it’s v1, we have been encountering non-believers who wonder “Are the NativeScript apps real native apps as they execute on the device? Or, they are hybrid after all :)”
With this blog post I would like to reveal the truth for the non-believers by dissecting a NativeScript app at runtime and displaying what objects are actually created and executed on iOS and Android. Well, I can tell you from now - these objects are the native UI components of the respective platform. But if you still don’t believe me, read on.
Learn about layouts in NativeScript and create great cross-platform UIs using a combination of XML markup and JavaScript.
Two weeks ago we kicked off the Summer of NativeScript, our program to get the development community excited about NativeScript, and adorned in some stylish NativeScript t-shirts.
And excited you are. In the last two weeks we've seen well over a dozen meetups scheduled spanning seven countries and five continents. (I'm looking at you Asia and Antarctica).
The camera sensor finds its place in more and more scenarios today. It’s not really just about taking the popular selfies or photos with friends, but also about serious business scenarios.
Today, I would like to introduce you to the cross-platform Camera API and demonstrate how you can effortlessly take photos with both Android and iOS devices using a single shared JavaScript code base.
Summer is a great time to get excited about building apps with NativeScript. Why this summer? Because if you run a NativeScript meetup in July, August, or September and let us know about it, we'll send you a NativeScript t-shirt and a pack of NativeScript stickers.
NativeScript 1.1 bits are live and you can start using them immediately! If you are updating from 1.0 - please read the update instructions. With this release we delivered three new fundamental featurenpms for the NativeScript framework - support for npmmodules, support for native iOS libraries and the initial version of NativeScript plugins. We also delivered a number of enhancements and bug fixes to the core framework - NativeScript is now more stable and faster.
If you follow closely the mobile space I’m sure you’ve heard the news coming from Google I/O conference. There is a new version of their popular mobile Android OS. With this preview version, codenamed “M”, they are shipping some really nice enhancements. You can download the latest SDKs here. In this sample app we are using the new fingerprits authentication APIs in NativeScript.
One of the frequently asked questions is if it is possible to use your JavaScript skills with NativeScript and implement an app for wearable devices. The answer to this is Yes you can and in this blog post we will show you how to build an app that runs on the Android Wear devices.
I’ve built a little calculator to mimic the calculator app that ships with iOS and thought I’d share the techniques I’ve used. Even though implementing a calculator is a pretty trivial task in itself, doing so is a good way to learn some concepts about a new technology. NativeScript is a fairly new technology that offers many extensibility points. By building a calculator in NativeScript you will learn these concepts and how these features work together.
HealthKit is framework that allows iOS apps that provide health and fitness services to share data. The user’s health information is stored in a centralized and secure location and every user decides which data should be available for your app. If your iOS app is designed to provide such services, the best way to do this is to use HealthKit.
The NativeScript framework already provides a fairly comprehensive set of standard UI controls that you need to build an app. But what if you want to build an app with the NativeScript framework using a 3rd-party library? We’ve got you covered. With the NativeScript framework you can effortlessly take a native iOS or Android library and start using it with JavaScript. As an example, let’s look at how to build a simple Seismograph app with the NativeScript framework and Telerik Chart for iOS. Here’s what the final result looks like:
This is a guest blog post by Miroslav Nedyalkov (@miro_nedyalkov) from our London-based partner Officernd (@officernd).
Data visualization is key component of every modern mobile app. Floorplans are no exception. With good floorplanning platform you could easily make your app stand out. For example you may:
The new abstractions in Angular2.0 allows the NativeScript team to start working on a compatibility layer which will allow developers who want to use AngularJS to simply drop it to their NativeScript apps and start using what they already know.
It is only two months after we released the first public version of NativeScript, but we got tons of positive feedback already on the work we have done so far. We got 3000 stars on GitHub, more than 1500 followers on twitter (@NativeScript) and our public NativeScript forum is quite popular these days. This help us a lot to validate that we are on the right track and we are working hard to meet the expectations. I hope that with each release you will feel more and more confident that NativeScript is the best choice for cross-platform mobile app development.
A common user experience for an application is to display a loading (splash) screen while it is initializing. Building our Telerik Next conference application, we wanted to display such a screen. While trivial for iOS, it turned there is no built-in mechanism in Android for achieving this functionality.
Sitefinity CMS is a powerful user-friendly .NET CMS product from Telerik. The great thing about Sitefinity is that it’s meticulously designed to not feel like a .NET CMS (You know the feel I mean…). Moreover you get to choose to develop using Pure Clean MVC, old school ASP.Net WebForms, or a patented hybrid of the two methods.
The last NativeScript webinar had a record-setting number of attendees. As such, we also had a record-setting 1000+ questions asked during the webinar!! Now, as you can guess we could not answer 1000+ questions in a couple of minutes at the end of the webinar.
So, we read all 1000+ questions post-webinar and select a handful of them to be answer in this blog post. After reading the questions, I believe many of them will be beneficial to the entire NativeScript community and not just the individual that posted the question during the live webinar.
NativeScript modules are JavaScript modules that adhere to the CommonJS specification and provide access to native APIs through the NativeScript runtime. Because NativeScript modules adhere to CommonJS, npm is a perfect place to store them.
