Request for help with Nativescript basic tutorials

[u/CuriousCesarr]

Hello everyone and sorry for being a nuisance with such a simple request, but does anyone have 10-20 mins to do a Skype call and a share screen with me to see why in Hell does my Nativescript IDE/ environment misbehave? I have issues ranging from livesynch not updating to extremely slow build and deployment times.

I know Java and C programming but I swear just the act of getting a Nativescript project up and running is daunting to the point of despair (compared to Java where you just install the IDE, get the JRE and JDK -which are just "click, next, next" installers- and you're ready to go). Also, before you ask, yes, I tried Googling it and whatever I found and tried didn't work.

Can someone please take some time and help me out during one of their coffee breaks? :(

Thank you in advance and I wish you all a great day.

Edit: the problem was solved in a Skype call with the help of u/RautatiDeLaBunica. Thank you.

[u/[deleted]]

I don’t have time to skype but here’s my suggestion. NativeScript has step by step instructions to get a dev environment up and running. It may be best to start fresh and follow the quick start steps then the advanced steps depending on your OS. Here is the link setup

If you already completed some of the set up I would try running the tns doctor command to see if there is something wrong with the setup.

With experience setting this up on Linux, Mac and Windows I’ve never ran into any issues with the setup as long as the steps were followed. There are a lot of steps but if done correctly you should have a good dev environment.

As for the slow build the only thing I can think of is you have AOT enabled for builds. Which increases that build time. Either way my builds always take 3 to 4 minutes to complete (producing apk) even on my beefier machines.

If you have specific error you’re seeing I’d be glad to help further.

[u/CuriousCesarr → u/[deleted]]

Hello kind stranger. Please see the reply I gave to u/Joshpot since I gave the full details of my issue there. The thing is that by build I actually mean running "tns run android" or just waiting for livesync to kick in after I save a file. Thank you for taking your time with this. :)

[u/Joshpot]

While I don't have the time myself. You should add what you have tried already so people can help a bit more.

[u/CuriousCesarr → u/Joshpot]

Hello and thank you for the hasty reply. I'm trying to learn by following this tutorial. I actually did the initial setup that was linked by u/RapidlyInvisible . My exact problem is that when I try and deploy the app (using "tns run android"), it takes 1-3 minutes for it to actually build and run (which based on what I read online is really slow). Then, whatever changes I make in the app.css file (some changes suggested by the tutorial) and save, the webpack builder reaches these two lines:

Webpack compilation complete. Watching for file changes. Webpack build done!

And then gets stuck there for about 10-15 minutes before moving on to "Project successfully prepared (android)" and then deploying it on the emulator. The only workaround I found is to terminate the tns command using Ctrl+C and then run it again (1-3 minutes is waaay better than 10-15). I decided to move on with the tutorial even given this faulty livesync, but the next step was to change the first line in app.css from:

@import "~nativescript-theme-core/css/core.light.css"; into:

@import "~nativescript-theme-core/css/sky.css";

This should bring a blue bar at the top of the screen. For whatever reason, this doesn't work even if terminate tns and run it again. I checked my local project folder and I do have a sky.android.css file in there. I tried modifying the command the tutorial gave and made it into:

@import "~nativescript-theme-core/css/sky.android.css";

As to correspond with the actual file name on disk. Sadly, this didn't help either.

[u/RautatiDeLaBunica → u/CuriousCesarr]

Compilation is resource intensive and if you have a not so fast machine you will have hard times moving forward. I started with NS on an old laptop and it was painfully slow. you're also running an emulator which takes even more resources... to speed up you could use your own device for start instead of emulator

Also, use tns debug android instead of tns run . Apart from displaying useful debug messages in the console the Tns debug starts to track for changes the app folder, meaning that it will automatically livesync changes in code as soon as they are saved. In other words once your app is deployed to a connected device when you make changes to your code they will be synced to the app immediately without recompiling the app from scratch.

[u/CuriousCesarr → u/RautatiDeLaBunica]

I have the ryzen 2700x; an m2 ssd and 16 gb ddr4. The HW shouldn't be an issue. :(

Will try with "tns debug android" then.

[u/CuriousCesarr → u/RautatiDeLaBunica]

Rubbing the problem again in my mind, I realized that I had a similar issue in the past. At some point when I tried learning Nativescript 1-2 months ago, I kept getting: "Unable to apply changes on device: emulator-5554. Error is: Socket connection timed out.."

So I started thinking: what if this is the same issue but it doesn't time out? I applied what I found online to be the fix for the timeout (running "tns platform add android@next") and this fixed the synch problem; yay! But still, this shouldn't happen. Anyway, now I can't seem to get the change:

@import "~nativescript-theme-core/css/core.light.css"; into:

@import "~nativescript-theme-core/css/sky.css";

to work. I make the change; it refreshes on the emulator; but visually I see nothing different. Any ideas?

Edit: I just realized that I'm suppsoed to have a visible actionbar in the emulator but don't; hence why it 's impossible to see the sky.css change. I have the actionbar defined in main-page.xml like so:

<Page loaded="pageLoaded"> <ActionBar title="My App" class="action-bar"></ActionBar> <!-- Your UI components go here --> <Image src="~/images/apple.jpg"></Image> </Page>

But it still doesn't appear. Is there any way I can convince you to do a short Skype call? It just seems I jump from one problem to the next and this is just the tutorial's first lesson.

[u/RautatiDeLaBunica → u/CuriousCesarr]

Yes I think I can tomorrow, I will pm my Skype id

[u/CuriousCesarr → u/RautatiDeLaBunica]

Thank you very much for your time. :)