Issue 48 June 25th 2019

News

React Native Open Source Update June 2019

Every since Christoph Nakazawa joined the React Native team as Engineering Manager, amazing things have happened. React Native is more "open source friendly" than ever, with the number of PRs from community members doubling, despite the Lean Core initiative. These frequent updates are a great way to stay in touch with what's going on with RN, and a reassuring proof that Facebook is still investing in the technology, more than ever.

Libraries & Tools

Announcing styled-components v5: Beast Mode 💪🔥

A mindblowing new version of styled-components came out, and it has no breaking changes, and tons of goodies 🤯😍

Handling Deep Links with React Navigation

A simple and very useful tutorial on how to handle deep links in React Native using React Navigation. As we've come to expect from Spencer Carli, this is quality content 👌🏼

React Native share PDF

A well-written tutorial on how to allow your users to share PDFs in your React Native app. It may seem simple, but like many things in RN, it's very simple on iOS, but not so easy on Android 😱

Open Source

react-native-common-intents -React Native Android Module that uses Android's Common intents actions like open image picker from gallery, open date settings, open wifi settings etc.

react-native-skeleton-content - A customizable skeleton-like loading placeholder for react native.

react-native-geocache-app - A simple cross platform (iOS and Android) React Native geocache app and server (powered by now.sh).

react-native-google-pay / react-native-apay - React Native bridges for Apple Pay and Google Pay

react-native-svg-animate - This package allow you to animate SVG path with different animation types in both Android and iOS applications

jetifire - Jetifire tool migrates support-library-dependent libraries in React Native to rely on the equivalent AndroidX packages instead

react-native-check-notification-permission - A little helper to check the notification permissions on iOS and Android

sign-in-with-apple - A bridge that supports the new iOS Apple sign in feature

react-native-v8 - Opt-in V8 runtime for React Native Android

react-native-splash-generate - Programmatically generates a launch image for all screen densities from a single image source.

margarita - Mobile and Web application implementing Kiwi.com Tequila API

react-native-web-hooks - Hooks for React Native web and Expo

Design

Announcing Global Styleguides—connecting design systems to engineering

The team at Zeplin built a new feature that makes the dev-design collaboration much smoother. I'm really looking forward to using this!

Videos

Deep Learning in JS

Machine learning is a subject that almost everyone has heard of, but that is understood by few. I'm extremely impressed at how clearly and seemingly effortlessly Ashi Krishnan addressed this monolithic topic, while still packing so much relevant content in only 30 minutes! It made me understand ML much better, I definitely recommend setting aside some time to watch this talk.

Comment

Happy Tuesday everyone!

Hope you've had a beautiful weekend! It was very sunny out here, but it's pouring rain today and all week 😭

To make up for the bad weather, I've been playing with the Public Beta of iPadOS, which was released over the weekend. So far, I'm super impressed, and excited for this new era in which tablets play a much bigger role in professional environments. One of the first things I looked up after hearing of iPadOS is whether I would be able to write code on my iPad, and the answer was yes (but not straightforwardly yet).

There was a minor community crisis last week, as Google released a new version of Google Play and Firebase, leading many React Native builds to fail, due to third party libraries having dependencies on these services. If you've struggled (or are struggling) with this issue, the RN core team addressed it here.

Chain React is approaching, with many Facebook Engineers attending and speaking, on top of many other amazing speakers, we're guaranteed tons of quality talks and content! If you haven't grabbed your ticket yet, it's now or never!

Cheers and enjoy your week!

Engineering

State of React Native

A very relevant and thorough analysis of React Native today by BugSnag, which compiles a data from a whooping ~77,000 Android apps and over 6000 iOS apps built using RN. The findings are super interesting, definitely worth a read!

Deep dive: How do React hooks really work?

I know, I know, Hooks are old news by now, and everyone's tired of seeing article after article being published about what you can do with them. This one's different, though. A common criticism I've heard in regards to Hooks is that they are "magical", people don't understand how they work, and they are scared to use what they don't understand. In this great write up, Shawn Wang (aka swyx) rebuilds hooks from scratch, in just 29 lines of code, demystifying the "magic" behind them.

Upgrading React Native to version 0.59 and beyond: a step-by-step guide

React Native 0.59 came with a lot of goodies, such as Hooks and support for JSC, but it also came with a newly cleaned up repo, meaning upgrading is not a piece of cake, especially if you're coming from an older version of RN. The author of this article goes through a step-by-step explanation of how to go through a relatively painless upgrade. Check it out if you're planning on upgrading soon!

Create a Youtube-integrated application using React Native

A straightforward and clear article on how to integrate media content from YouTube in your React Native apps.

React Native Community contribution - DateTimePicker component

An explanation of how and why the GoDaddy Engineering team got involved in the Lean Core initiative, and helped the React Native team by extracting the DateTimePicker component into its own repo.

Business

How I Survived Insane Hypergrowth at Airbnb

Great read by the former Director of Product at Airbnb, who made it through an exciting but very intense period of Hypergrowth at Airbnb. Interesting perspective if you're into the startup world!

Random

Delightful User Interfaces: Easter Eggs

This is not exactly related to React Native, but it's a great read on how the Netflix UI Engineering team built a really cool easter egg animation on their website for Jessica Jones' latest season, using plain old CSS!