Book Image

Getting Started with NativeScript

By : Nathanael J. Anderson
Book Image

Getting Started with NativeScript

By: Nathanael J. Anderson

Overview of this book

NativeScript allows you to build a fast cross-platform application that has a native UI. NativeScript is a true cross-platform framework that generates native speed applications using the native components of the host platform, all using JavaScript. Although NativeScript allows you to build your application in JavaScript, you have full access to the host OS from your code, allowing you to easily tweak or use new platform features instantly at native code speeds. Whether you have already developed multiple applications or zero applications, this book will help you to develop your next application in a cross-platform framework quickly, saving you a massive amount of time and money. This book concisely shows you NativeScript’s built-in framework that allows you to rapidly develop a fully-working compiled cross-platform application in just a few chapters. It starts by laying the foundation of NativeScript and working through the fundamentals to create a basic shell of the application. Moving on, you’ll see how to build a full-fledged application step by step. We’ll show you how to use plugins, and how to communicate with the native OS libraries easily so that you can customize your application as if your app was created in Java or Objective C. We then deal with the issues that arise from being cross platform and compensate for the different screen sizes, screen resolutions, and device abilities. Finally, we progress to testing and deploying your app.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Getting Started with NativeScript
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Screen size differences


Now, in most cases, the completely different screen sizes can be handled using the platform screen size .minW or minH qualifiers so that you can build a custom layout when you are dealing with tablets versus a phone-sized device. Unfortunately, this is not always the case for any image you might want to show. In this case, you have to do a bit of manual work. Each image has a set resolution. The larger the resolution of the image, the more memory it takes, but on higher resolution devices, images obviously look much better. You can deal with images in one of the following three ways to try and make your application look the best on all devices.

Fonts

The first is the way we did in crossCommunicator. We used an icon font that has all the images we needed as a font character. Fonts are scalable, so irrespective of the resolution of the screen, the font renders and looks really nice. To make an even smaller font file, there are several websites, such as http://icomoon...