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

Fonts


Google maintains a large number of very nice fonts (https://www.google.com/fonts) that can be easily used for no charge in any of our applications. The one we will use for our application is the one that has all sorts of icons, some of which we will use to make our app look a lot nicer or make our app be a bit more consistent with other apps on our devices. You can download the Material Icon font from Google's GitHub repo at https://github.com/google/material-design-icons/blob/master/iconfont/MaterialIcons-Regular.ttf. Then, click on the RAW link, and it should download the font for you.

Once the file has finished downloading, you will need to create a new folder called fonts in your app folder, like we discussed in Chapter 2, The Project Structure. Then, copy the MaterialIcons-Regular.ttf font file into that app/fonts folder.

On Android and iOS, they both are currently able to auto-register the font by the name in the font-family declaration. If you look at the font-family declaration...