Today, we’re excited to announce the seventh beta release of Ionic 2. Beta 7 includes many bug fixes and several new features, including migrating to Angular 2’s RC build. Take a look at the changelog to see what’s included.

What’s New

The biggest change in Beta 7 is jumping to the Angular Release Candidate! Angular has moved to a new, more modular design, so this will be a significant breaking change for all Ionic 2 apps. To make things simple, we have prepared detailed instructions on how to upgrade an app to Beta 7. It should be a straightforward process that takes a few minutes or less. Please let us know if you experience any issues.

The DateTime component is a brand-new, highly extensible component built from the ground up to make it easy for users to select dates and times. You’ve been asking for a better datetime input, and we think you’ll love what we’ve come up with. This new component works with a variety of date format options to present the perfect interface for any app. Please check out the docs, give it a shot, and let us know what you think! We are so excited about this component that we’ll have a detailed blog post about it soon!

Inset modals are a new option for presenting modal content. Instead of taking up the full width and height of the viewport, an inset modal will only take up a portion of the width and height. Inset modals are now the default for larger screens, such as tablets and traditional computers.



What’s Next

Last week, during a webinar with Microsoft’s Apache Cordova Team, Ionic team members Brandy and Tim let the cat out of the bag: We’re aiming for a release candidate build of Ionic 2 by mid-June. If you’re interested in following along and seeing where we are, please refer to the Ionic 2 Roadmap document, as well as our GitHub Milestones.

Here are a few things we’ll be working on in the coming months:

Swipeable tabs: We’re working on giving you the ability to swipe between tabs in your app, similar to the Material Design tabs.

Popover: This will give you a way to present a list of actions in an app. It can be useful as an overflow menu for less often used actions, such as a link to the application settings, or a link to an about page.

Range slider: This UI component consists of a slider with a handle that can be dragged to select a specific value from a range.

Chips: Chips are a basic component in Material Design. They’re small blocks that hold information about something more complex.

Right to left: RTLs support is a requirement for many applications. We have been working with the community to get more information surrounding how RTL works, and we are continuously adding support for it to the framework. But we’re not done, and we’d love to have your help.

Electron support: Electron is a new, open technology for building traditional desktop apps using web technologies. Ionic 2 will have first-class Electron support.

Progressive Web app support: Progressive Web Apps are a new way to deliver amazing native-like experiences via the web.

Desktop web support: In addition to the mobile web, our intent is to support traditional desktop-style web apps with Ionic 2.

Conclusion

Please upgrade your Ionic 2 apps to Beta 7, so we can resolve any issues sooner than later. Please follow these instructions to have a smooth upgrade experience.

We’re really excited about Ionic 2, and we think you’re going to love it! Ionic 2 will enable developers to build an app once and deploy it to all major platforms including mobile, desktop and the web! Thank you to the amazing Ionic community for all of the support and the awesome contributions. We sincerely appreciate it. Happy coding!