v1.3 Platform Upgrade

We’ve launched the 1.3 version of our platform including a new visual toolkit to make it even simpler to use our cloud build service.

Amongst the many changes and improvements over the past month that are rolled into this release, we added:

• Ability to run custom hooks: This enables you to add a pre-build step such as CoffeeScript compilation
• forge.file.getLocal API call: to access files bundled with the app
• forge.file.cacheURL: to download remote files and cache them locally. Here’s an example of how to use it.
• True native tabbar and topbar: easy headers and footers for your app
• Deploy iOS apps straight to the device with:forge run ios --ios.device device

To upgrade, the format of your config.json needs to be updated, but we’ve made that easy – just run:

forge migrate

Trigger Toolkit

Today we’re also releasing a new way to build and manage Forge apps, called the Trigger Toolkit.

This makes it even easier to use our cloud build service to create apps for iOS, Android and the web:

• Visual interface to create, build and run apps
• Console to view status logged messages
• Simple installer for OSX and Windows
• Built-in documentation to speed up your development
• Ability to get in touch with our support team easily from within our tools

Oh, and the command-line tools come bundled with it, so you can still use them for all your automation needs.

We’d love your feedback, you can download it now from our website.

Questions? Let us know on our StackOverflow tag and we’ll respond straightaway.

Doubled again – 20,000 actions in April!

Finally, thanks so much to you for your continued support. We doubled usage again in April with more than 20,000 build, test and package actions:

May is shaping up to be a fantastic month as well with many new features and fixes planned. Stay tuned on Hacker News and Twitter.