Today, we are introducing Lexxy, a new rich text editor for Action Text. It’s based on Lexical — Meta’s text editing framework — and it brings a much better text editing experience to Rails: Good HTML semantics. Paragraphs are real <p> tags, as they should be. Markdown support: shortcuts, auto-formatting on paste. Real-time code syntax highlighting. Create links by pasting URLs on selected text. Configurable prompts. Support for mentions and other interactive prompts with multiple loading and filtering strategies. Preview attachments like PDFs and Videos in the editor. Works seamlessly with Action Text and Active Storage. We created Lexxy because Trix was falling short of expectations in certain areas, and we encountered technical barriers when attempting to offer the experience we wanted. Lexxy comes with a bunch of juicy improvements, but more than that, we now have a fantastic foundation to build on top of. Lexxy will also bring a great improvement to Action Text: we will let you configure the editor in Action Text just like you configure the database in Active Record. This will open the door to integrating other editors in Rails. Text editing is central to our products. We believe Lexxy will let us deliver the editing experience we want. We are launching an early beta today, give it a try!

Note: Shortly after releasing this gem, we renamed it from Action Native Push to Action Push Native, in case you arrived here looking for the gem of the former name. More details here. We’ve open-sourced Action Push Native, a Rails gem for sending push notifications to mobile platforms. It supports both Apple and Google push notification services. Why did we build it? We created it to migrate off Amazon SNS and Pinpoint, as part of our broader cloud exit. We’re using it in Basecamp and HEY to send more than 10 million push notifications per day without a hitch. Action Push Native relies on HTTP/2 persistent connections to the Apple Push Notification service, which significantly reduced job duration compared to our previous HTTP/1 setup with AWS Pinpoint: AWS Pinpoint jobs duration Action Push Native jobs duration How does it work? The gem connects directly to the Apple (APNs) and Google (FCM) push notification services. It handles retries, rate-limiting, and deleting dead devices automatically. Configure each platform with your credentials, and you can start sending notifications like this: device = ApplicationPushDevice.create! \ name: "iPhone 16", token: "6c267f26b173cd9595ae2f6702b1ab560371a60e7c8a9e27419bd0fa4a42e58f", platform: "apple" notification = ApplicationPushNotification.new \ title: "Hello world!", body: "Welcome to Action Push Native" notification.deliver_later_to(device) Version 0.1.0 is available now. You can read more on GitHub. We hope you find it useful!

We’ve just launched Hotwire Native v1.2 and it’s the biggest update since the initial launch last year. The update has several key improvements, bug fixes, and more API consistency between platforms. And we’ve created all new iOS and Android demo apps to show it off! A web-first framework for building native mobile apps Improvements There are a few significant changes in v1.2 that are worth specifically highlighting. Route decision handlers Hotwire Native apps route internal urls to screens in your app, and route external urls to the device’s browser. Historically, though, it wasn’t straightforward to customize the default behavior for unique app needs. In v1.2, we’ve introduced the RouteDecisionHandler concept to iOS (formerly only on Android). Route decisions handlers offer a flexible way to decide how to route urls in your app. Out-of-the-box, Hotwire Native registers these route decision handlers to control how urls are routed: AppNavigationRouteDecisionHandler: Routes all internal urls on your app’s domain through your app. SafariViewControllerRouteDecisionHandler: (iOS Only) Routes all external http/https urls to a SFSafariViewController in your app. BrowserTabRouteDecisionHandler: (Android Only) Routes all external http/https urls to a Custom Tab in your app. SystemNavigationRouteDecisionHandler: Routes all remaining external urls (such as sms: or mailto:) through device’s system navigation. If you’d like to customize this behavior you can register your own RouteDecisionHandler implementations in your app. See the documentation for details. Server-driven historical location urls If you’re using Ruby on Rails, the turbo-rails gem provides the following historical location routes. You can use these to manipulate the navigation stack in Hotwire Native apps. recede_or_redirect_to(url, **options) — Pops the visible screen off of the navigation stack. refresh_or_redirect_to(url, **options) — Refreshes the visible screen on the navigation stack. resume_or_redirect_to(url, **options) — Resumes the visible screen on the navigation stack with no further action. In v1.2 there is now built-in support to handle these “command” urls with no additional path configuration setup necessary. We’ve also made improvements so they handle dismissing modal screens automatically. See the documentation for details. Bottom tabs When starting with Hotwire Native, one of the most common questions developers ask is how to support native bottom tab navigation in their apps. We finally have an official answer! We’ve introduced a HotwireTabBarController for iOS and a HotwireBottomNavigationController for Android. And we’ve updated the demo apps for both platforms to show you exactly how to set them up. New demo apps To better show off all the features in Hotwire Native, we’ve created new demo apps for iOS and Android. And there’s a brand new Rails web app for the native apps to leverage. Hotwire Native demo app Clone the GitHub repos to build and run the demo apps to try them out: iOS repo Android repo Rails app Huge thanks to Joe Masilotti for all the demo app improvements. If you’re looking for more resources, Joe even wrote a Hotwire Native for Rails Developers book! Release notes v1.2 contains dozens of other improvements and bug fixes across both platforms. See the full release notes to learn about all the additional changes: iOS release notes Android release notes Take a look If you’ve been curious about using Hotwire Native for your mobile apps, now is a great time to take a look. We have documentation and guides available on native.hotwired.dev and we’ve created really great demo apps for iOS and Android to help you get started.

We’ve just released Mission Control — Jobs v1.0.0, the dashboard and set of extensions to operate background jobs that we introduced earlier this year. This new version is the result of 92 pull requests, 67 issues and the help of 35 different contributors. It includes many bugfixes and improvements, such as: Support for Solid Queue’s recurring tasks, including running them on-demand. Support for API-only apps. Allowing immediate dispatching of scheduled and blocked jobs. Backtrace cleaning for failed jobs’ backtraces. A safer default for authentication, with Basic HTTP authentication enabled and initially closed unless configured or explicitly disabled. Recurring tasks in Mission Control — Jobs, with a subset of the tasks we run in production We use Mission Control — Jobs daily to manage jobs HEY and Basecamp 4, with both Solid Queue and Resque, and it’s the dashboard we recommend if you’re using Solid Queue for your jobs. Our plan is to upstream some of the extensions we’ve made to Active Job and continue improving it until it’s ready to be included by default in Rails together with Solid Queue. If you want to help us with that, are interested in learning more or have any issues or questions, head over to the repo in GitHub. We hope you like it!