281–290 of 298 posts
I'm interested in this primarily because I don't find it appealing to invest in (basically non-transferable) iOS platform skills. I want to build native mobile UIs for my projects, but not with a dead-end language and tools.
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React Native is the most promising cross-platform UI toolkit I've thus far encountered. I guess a lot depends on what is meant by encountered but Xamarin would probably be a much more full featured cross platform UI toolkit than anything else out currently.
Time for the now, almost weekly, shoutout for http://reactiveui.net which is a functional reactive programming framework that uses the Reactive Extensions for .NET to create elegant, testable User Interfaces that run on any mobile or desktop platform. Supports Xamarin.iOS, Xamarin.Android, Xamarin.Mac, WPF, Windows Forms, Windows Phone 8 and Windows Store apps. Check out "Writing Mobile Apps the Github Way by Paul Be…
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What is it about the "seriousness" of an app that would demand Apple's crappy interface builder?
Haha crappy. Hard to take anything you say seriously if you really believe that.
Dragging and dropping all the time is cumbersome and it is impossible to version control storyboards in any meaningful way. Dragging lines to outlets is a real pain, and the references stick around after you delete stuff, causing countless infuriating runtime crashes.
Most things that you would like to do can only be accomplished with goofy hacks.
Long thread of 50loc+ answers to something that would be accomplished with one line of CSS: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19226965/how-to-hide-ios7...
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With React Native, instead of writing HTML/CSS and running it on a crappy browser embedded in an app, you write code that looks like HTML/CSS (it's actually JSX)[1][2] and it is translated to native code. [1] https://facebook.github.io/react/docs/displaying-data.html [2] https://facebook.github.io/react/docs/jsx-in-depth.html
It's not translated. The JS runs to create a declarative description of what the ui should look like, which is reduced to a diff representing the changes that needs to be made to the native ui. These change commands are then marshalled to native code which simply implements the changes (add this thing, move this thing, remove this thing).
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"You don't even have to dive into React (which has its own unique way that I'd call barely JS anymore)." Eh, I assume you're referring to the JSX syntax. I happily don't use it at all. It's all just JavaScript functions and objects.
Yes, the JSX is "weird" to me. But even the pure JS method. I shouldn't have said "barely JS anymore". I'm just not a huge fan of apps built entirely in JS that spit out markup. I find it so messy personally, but also a giant brain shift too. The commenter I was replying to wanted a way to take a web site and get it to run as an app. HTML, CSS, JS -- Cordova / Phonegap is one way to do it that requires very little re…
Compared to more complex frameworks, React hems closely to JavaScript as a language. I enjoy working with it because it lets me write entirely in JavaScript without any weird template languages or typical framework "bloat." In my experience, it helps me write readable and correct frontend code.
Random tangent: sometimes I imagine that React would have another name—say, something dull like "libdomdiff." The JavaScript world for some reason seems to operate by making everything into a fancy big deal; every library needs its own conferences and consultancies. I feel like being a "React expert" is kind of overrated. It's basically just a library with like a dozen functions.
But you're right too that it is a different way of writing apps. I hope your experiences with it will be as positive as mine!
Should someone learning iOS development stick to vanilla iOS while learning, or would it be feasible to use React Native from the outset? I already have some React experience, and I have some React-based web app that I'd like to turn into native iOS app.
I actually just completed an iOS course. I think that it's good to know how things are done, and there are some things that you'll want to do completely native. (Such as complex graphics). But the iOS interface building tools are utter crap compared the JS/HTML ecosystem. I would say, build a few small apps completely native, just to see what you're not missing out on and be ready to write swift or objc to do really…
Cool to see this. By my count we now have, in no particular order: - React Native from Facebook ( https://github.com/facebook/react-native ) - Appcelerator's Titanium and Alloy Frameworks ( http://appcelerator.com ) - Telerik's Native Script ( http://telerik.com/nativescript ) - Xamarin ( http://xamarin.com ) As I understand it, all three of these frameworks have a JS (or C#) runtime that is compiled along with the a…
I would love to see a comparison between some of these different frameworks. HN is abuzz about React Native, but is it really that much different than the others? In particular, do the others attempt to be declarative like React Native? Is the performance comparable? The main advantage I see is that it's open source and free (with some patent caveats).
The first thing I do now on each Facebook open-source reveal, is to check the PATENTS file for the toxic second paragraph, to see if they've changed it. Sadly, no. I can't imagine being able to use this at any decent-sized company with lawyers. :-( https://github.com/facebook/react-native/blob/master/PATENTS See for example the discussions at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9111849 (eg. https://news.ycombinator.…
Well, you can make a pull request editing it. /s