Ionic 2 Beta 8 has arrived! This release brings many bug fixes, some breaking API changes and even a few new highly requested components!

We recommend reading the changelog for a full list of changes and, as always, letting us know on GitHub if you find any issues.



What’s New in Beta 8?

Popover has landed

A Popover is a dialog box that appears on top of the current page. It’s positioned relative to the element that was tapped to open it, or in the center of the view if no element was passed.

Popovers can be used for displaying all types of information, but they’re most commonly used for overflow actions that don’t fit in the navigation bar. Take a look at our Popover documentation, which includes different usage examples.

Ranges…forever



The Range is a slider that lets users select from an array of values by moving a slider knob along the slider bar or track. The Range component has one knob by default, but it can be customized to use two knobs with a lower and upper value. We’ve included a ton of properties that can be set to change the behavior of the Range, such as setting the number to step by, and adding a pin that displays the value while being dragged.

As with other v2 components, the Range comes with full platform continuity design for iOS, Android, and Windows versions. Make sure to check out the Range documentation for more information!

What’s Changed in Beta 8?

We’ve made some API changes in order to improve the framework and make it more compatible with other libraries. We’re hoping these changes will be the last major changes to the API. Let’s dig in.

Progressive Web App Support

The web is the future of apps: It runs everywhere, it’s the most widely known technology stack, and it powers a rapidly increasing number of apps. Progressive Web Apps give you the best of both worlds: cross-platform app store deployment on iOS, Android, and Windows, along with deployment to the mobile web with the same code!

We’ve started the process of optimizing Ionic 2 in specific ways that improve our support for Progressive Web Apps. Here’s the low down:

Ionic’s custom decorators have been removed.

@App and @Page should be replaced with @Component .

and should be replaced with . IonicApp has been renamed to App .

has been renamed to . ionicBootstrap is required to bootstrap the app.

is required to bootstrap the app. Config is now the third parameter in ionicBootstrap(rootComponent, providers, config) .

. Property prodMode is now a config option, enabling or disabling production mode.

Please see the changelog for a step-by-step guide to update your app.

Ionic Component Events

All Ionic component events have been renamed to start with ion . This is to prevent the Ionic events from clashing with native HTML events. For a full list of the events changed, please see the changelog.

Ionic Lifecycle Events

All Ionic lifecycle events have been renamed from the onPage prefix to an ionView prefix. The following is a full list of the name changes.

onPageLoaded renamed to ionViewLoaded

renamed to onPageWillEnter renamed to ionViewWillEnter

renamed to onPageDidEnter renamed to ionViewDidEnter

renamed to onPageWillLeave renamed to ionViewWillLeave

renamed to onPageDidLeave renamed to ionViewDidLeave

renamed to onPageWillUnload renamed to ionViewWillUnload

renamed to onPageDidUnload renamed to ionViewDidUnload

So, What’s Next?

We’re gearing up for a release candidate in the very near future! Our main focus in the coming weeks will be on performance improvements and improving existing components. If you’d like to know what we’re working on, take a look at the Ionic 2 Roadmap document, as well as our GitHub Milestones.

Thanks!

As we work towards a release candidate, we want to say thank you to everyone for all of your contributions. We appreciate every issue, every pull request, every comment on the forums, Slack channel, GitHub, and every other way you all have contributed.

If you’d like to contribute to Ionic 2, we would love your help! Please see our contributing documentation for some of the ways you can contribute.