Open Source
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Great project from Ryan McDermott showing how to authenticate with your existing backend using react-native-cookies.
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Template project for a React Native app with Relay and a GraphQL NodeJS server.
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Parallax header component that's ready for the iPhone X.
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Progress bar component/demo that uses icons to enhance brand experience.
Videos
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Great talk from Michael Jackson on how a component with a render prop or children prop can do anything a Higher Order Component can do. Interesting take on the matter and a reminder to keep it simple!
When “Good Enough” Just Isn’t Good Enough
Coming from React Native Europe is this talk from Jani Eväkallio on the need to build delightful native feeling experiences in React Native and how to get there.
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Learn how the underlying Yoga layout engine works in React Native from Emil Sjölander.
Around the Web
How I ditched Expo for pure React Native
Learn how to move an Expo app to our React Native in this post from Daniel K..
A Year of React Native: Styling Part 2
Sam Murray shares a lot of great techniques for managing in styles in React Native that they've learned from developing four React Native apps.
React Navigation Drawer Tutorial — Part 2
Customize a DrawerNavigator from react-navigation from this post from Gant Laborde.
Using MobX With React Native To Make a Counter
Nice post from Jordan Holland on how to create a counter with MobX in React Native.
Frameworks
Expo SDK 21.0.0
Expo SDK 21 is out with a lot of great improvements and new APIs. You can get the full release notes here and here are some highlights:
- Improvements to AppLoading, SplashScreen, geocoding, and the development loading screen.
- Camera now allows for video recording. 📹
- SecureStore now works on older Android versions.
- The Payments API now works on Android along with the addition of Google AdMob support. 💸
Experimental gestures with react-native-gesture-handler.
This is an API we're currently watching and aiming to put into production. It provides a more native experience with gestures which is great for complex interactions.
A very exciting release with a lot of appealing changes, hats off to the Expo team!
Also released by Expo this week was their anti-pitch for their SDK. Always good to get differing opinions. 😂
expo.io
Augmented Reality
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Incredible project from Jelmer Verhoog showing an AR RC Plane in action using ARKit. You can follow the AR Airplanes project here. ✈️
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We love this Sky Guide app built with ARKit, check out the video above.
Non Technical
A few things I learned working at Facebook
Really thoughtful post here from Dan Abramov on some lessons he learned from working at Facebook. We really enjoyed his thoughts on debugging:
hashnode.comUse binary search and scientific method. Not literally in the code, but in how you approach it. Have a bug somewhere between callsites A and B? Put a log in the middle. It's between A and the midpoint? Put another log in the middle. Something's wrong with some input? Eliminate half the input. It's working? Try the other half. Etc. Debugging can feel very arbitrary but it's straightforward when you do it mechanically. Observe, form a hypothesis, come up with a way to test it, repeat. And cut things in half when there are too many.
It was a bit of a surprise Friday when we learned Facebook was relicensing React and other frameworks under the MIT license. While this doesn't include React Native for now Facebook has said that they'll be investigating other products in the future in their blog post on the matter. We feel comfortable using React Native with either license and hope this resolves whatever fears people had with using the +patents license.
Outside of our newsletter we updated AsyncImageAnimated to v3 with progressive and placeholder image support. Also be on the lookout for a post on our blog on gesture handling with react-native-gesture-handler. Have a great week!
Have a question you want answered in our React Native newsletter? Drop us a line [email protected] and we'll feature it in our next issue. ✌🏻
Wyatt | React Native Coach