Issue 64 May 12th 2020

Hello

Quick bites

One developer built an extremely impressive AR app with Expo allowing you to copy objects in the room and paste them into a document on a laptop.
The React Native team is looking for submissions for users of the framework to highlight in their documentation.
The Expo team has been pumping out cool stuff lately, such as Universal login, Fast refresh on Expo Web, and lean builds for Android.
React Native EU 2020 is looking for speakers. This years conference will be held virtually and they currently have a CFP live for a few more days - so jump on this if you're interested!

News

Plexamp v3: the road to React Native bliss

A nice write-up from the Plex team who've just launched two apps written entirely with Expo: Plexamp (a beautiful Plex music player, available on five platforms) and Plex Dash (a Plex Media Server admin app on iOS and Android).

The Move to React Native

Another write-up on another company's switch to using React Native, this time by Matthew Eckstein, former Senior Director of Engineering at ClassPass. This one is a good read, and as Matthew puts it, "Our adoption of React Native was, for all of us at ClassPass, a real lesson in the huge benefits that can accrue from both careful planning and successful adaptation."

Tutorials

How we reduced our React Native app size by 60% with a few simple fixes

Mutual took a look at their app size and realized it was about 60% larger than their peer's median. In this retrospective, they talk about how they gained an install conversion rate boost by 2.5% and how they pulled it off.

Conditional rendering in React Native may crash your app

Daniel wrote a great article about conditional rendering with the && operator. He outlines how conditional rendering done wrong can occasionally lead to errors in React Native and how to avoid them.

Build React Native apps for Microsoft Surface Duo

A blog post from the team at Microsoft showing how you can target the Surface Duo with React Native and take advantage of the hardware's unique features, such as its dual screens, in your codebase!

Deep Learning for Natural Language Processing on Mobile Devices

A cool piece from Yuefeng Zhang, PhD where he outlines the base steps taken to setup a mobile app that handles reading comprehension using Expo, React-Native, TensorFlow.js, and MobileBERT. This would make a good starting point of a setup for anyone interested in tinkering with this tech.

Open Source

PierreCapo/react-native-socials: Twitter, Instagram, (and more!) into your react-native app

ilkerkesici/react-native-assitive-touch: AssitiveTouch component like IPhone

mak12/rn-faded-scrollview: A simple and customisable React Native component that allows you to add fade effect in ScrollView at both ends.

Kida007/react-native-medium-clap: medium clap animation for react-native & react-native-web

NewBieBR/react-native-magic-confetti: Beautiful and butter smooth confetti animation for React Native

vanGalilea/react-native-testing: This is how you should test your react-native components with Jest and React Native Testing Library

Fausto95/rn-async-storage-flipper: React Native's Async Storage logger for Flipper

helderburato/react-native-scaled-sheet: 📏 A React Native interceptor for StyleSheet to scale sizes based in screen dimensions.

Gustash/react-native-image-keyboard: React Native TextInput expansion to enable media input.

jk-gan/redux-flipper: Redux middleware for React Native for Flipper

AndyOsei/rn-onboarding-screens: Beautiful Onboarding Screens for use in your next react native project.

Design

Atomic CSS-in-JS

Learn what atomic CSS is, how it relates to functional / utility-first CSS like TailwindCSS, and which big players are adopting it in their modern React codebases. Thanks for the submission, Sebastien!

Around the Web

v1-RC1 of Deno is out

If you haven't been following along, Deno is a new runtime of Javascript aiming to be a "better" Node. Learn a little more about that here, and if you're ready to tinker - v1-RC1 is out now.