Implement Social Media Sharing In A NativeScript App

Every app lately has some social media aspect to it. Most commonly, apps will allow you to share some kind of data, whether it be an image or text, to social media networks such as Facebook or Twitter. Sharing via email or SMS message still is classified as social sharing. When building NativeScript Android and iOS applications, sharing data isn’t complicated.

We’re going to see how to share image data and text data on social media networks via a Telerik NativeScript Android and iOS mobile application.

Add Touch ID Authentication Support To Your NativeScript App

Being able to authenticate within a mobile application using your fingerprint offers a certain convenience that is of huge benefit in modern applications. Using the iOS touch id, doors can be opened in the land of application security and since Telerik NativeScript can interface with native APIs and features, touch id becomes available for use within our JavaScript based application.

We’re going to see how to show secure content within our application, only accessible after successfully authenticating using a fingerprint and the iOS touch id features.

Webinar Series: Building A CEA2N And NativeScript Application

Today I have finished the final episode of a five-part webinar series on the subject of Couchbase, Express Framework, Angular, and Node.js (CEA2N) application development. This webinar series has been going on for the past five weeks where each week I covered a new topic relative to the stack leading up to a NativeScript mobile application.

Each episode of this webinar was recorded and can be viewed for free here. This is some premium content!

An episode breakdown and project source code can be seen below.

Why You Should Not Use Ionic Serve For Hybrid Apps

I’ve written a lot of Ionic Framework and Ionic 2 blog articles and have answered even more questions and troubleshooted more problems. When it comes to Ionic Framework, if I had to estimate, I’d say about 80% of the time the problems were related to the Ionic Service solution that the Ionic team offers.

I’ve written a post similar to this before on the topic of properly testing your Ionic Framework applications, but since it’s alarming how many people are still running into these issues I think it is worth bringing up again.

Use The HTTP Module Instead Of Fetch In NativeScript

Not too long ago I wrote about using the NativeScript fetch module for making HTTP requests in an Android and iOS mobile application. Personally I find that the fetch module is a bit awkward to use, so this time we’re going to take a look at using the http module instead.

The great thing about the NativeScript http module is that it is pretty much the same as it is in the other languages.

Fill Empty Space With UI Elements Using The NativeScript GridLayout

So recently I found myself needing to create a screen in a NativeScript Android and iOS app that had a ListView that sat below, or above, a Label UI element. The problem I faced was that there were issues with element sizing. On my first attempt I ended up with a Label and ListView that only took up a small portion of the screen, when I wanted the ListView to take up all remaining space. This is where the GridLayout comes in with its ability to have custom row and column sizing.

Using a GridLayout you can specify how rows and columns are fit around the screen.

Use The Android Palette Class With NativeScript

I’m a big fan of Material Design, the ripple (ink) effect and the use of color are my favorites. According to the Material Design spec in regards to color:

Color in material design is inspired by bold hues juxtaposed with muted environments, deep shadows, and bright highlights. Material takes cues from contemporary architecture, road signs, pavement marking tape, and athletic courts. Color should be unexpected and vibrant.

The other day I wanted to change the action bar color to style with a user’s profile picture. Since there is no way to guess what color the picture is going to be, the Palette class and its methods to extract colors from the image were exactly what I needed.