ui-surface

@nativescript-community/ui-surface

Floating surface for toolbars and action groups: Material 3 surface on Android, Liquid Glass (blur before iOS 26) on iOS.

iOS	Android

Table of Contents

• Installation
• Usage
• API
• Demos and Development
  • Repo Setup
  • Build
  • Demos
• Contributing
  • Update repo
  • Update readme
  • Update doc
  • Publish
  • modifying submodules
• Questions

Android	iOS
M3 surface container pill with elevation (GridLayout + shape)	UIVisualEffectView + UIGlassEffect (iOS 26), UIBlurEffect before

Installation

npm install @nativescript-community/ui-surface

The Android components use Material 3: see the repository README for the theme.

Usage

<Surface horizontalAlignment="center" verticalAlignment="bottom" padding="6">
    <StackLayout orientation="horizontal">
        <Button variant="plain" src="sys://house" width="52" height="52" />
        <Button variant="plain" src="sys://magnifyingglass" width="52" height="52" />
    </StackLayout>
</Surface>

Use variant="plain" buttons on iOS and variant="text" on Android inside the surface: the surface is then the only visible shape. For a group of buttons that each keep their own glass, use variant="glass" buttons (see ui-button) in the core LiquidGlassContainer, which merges the glass of its children on iOS 26.

When to use it (HIG and Material): for the navigation and controls layer, floating above the content, never for content itself (use ui-card).

API

A layout (a GridLayout): the children are laid out as usual.

Property
variant	regular (default) or clear
interactive	iOS: the glass reacts to touches
tint	iOS: tint of the glass
background-color, border-width, border-color, border-radius	apply to the surface. The shape is a capsule by default
elevation	Android: 6dp by default (0 for clear)

Demos and Development

Repo Setup

The repo uses submodules. If you did not clone with --recursive then you need to call

git submodule update --init

The package manager used to install and link dependencies must be pnpm or yarn. npm wont work.

To develop and test: if you use yarn then run yarn if you use pnpm then run pnpm i

Interactive Menu:

To start the interactive menu, run npm start (or yarn start or pnpm start). This will list all of the commonly used scripts.

Build

npm run build.all

WARNING: it seems yarn build.all wont always work (not finding binaries in node_modules/.bin) which is why the doc explicitly uses npm run

Demos

npm run demo.[ng|react|svelte|vue].[ios|android]

npm run demo.svelte.ios # Example

Demo setup is a bit special in the sense that if you want to modify/add demos you dont work directly in demo-[ng|react|svelte|vue] Instead you work in demo-snippets/[ng|react|svelte|vue] You can start from the install.ts of each flavor to see how to register new demos

Contributing

Update repo

You can update the repo files quite easily

First update the submodules

npm run update

Then commit the changes Then update common files

npm run sync

Then you can run yarn|pnpm, commit changed files if any

Update readme

npm run readme

Update doc

npm run doc

Publish

The publishing is completely handled by lerna (you can add -- --bump major to force a major release) Simply run

npm run publish

modifying submodules

The repo uses https:// for submodules which means you won't be able to push directly into the submodules. One easy solution is t modify ~/.gitconfig and add

[url "ssh://git@github.com/"]
	pushInsteadOf = https://github.com/

Questions

If you have any questions/issues/comments please feel free to create an issue or start a conversation in the NativeScript Community Discord.