React Native 0.62 and Flipper

In this post Andréas Hanss gives us a tour on Flipper. Flipper is a platform for debugging iOS, Android and React Native apps. Visualize, inspect, and control your apps from a simple desktop interface. To add flipper support to your React Native project, I recommend the “Add Flipper Support” section from the Upgrade to React …

Paper Phone – A printable paper phone which helps you take a break from your digital world

Nice experiment by Google: A lot of people feel that they spend too much time on their phones and struggle to find a balance with technology. Paper Phone helps you have a little break away from your digital world by printing a personal booklet of the key information you’ll need that day. Paper Phone →

Hermes, a JavaScript engine optimized for running React Native on Android

Interesting announcement from Facebook: Hermes is an open-source JavaScript engine optimized for running React Native apps on Android. For many apps, simply enabling Hermes will result in improved start-up time, decreased memory usage and smaller app size. At this time Hermes is an opt-in React Native feature, and this guide explains how to enable it. …

Automatically create an APK from your Progressive Web App with PWA2APK

As mentioned in How to publish your PWA onto the Google Play Store it’s now possible to publish your PWA’s onto the Google Play Store. Thanks to PWA2APK you no longer need to manually create your APK: “just” enter the URL of your PWA and an APK – which you’ll need to publish manually – …

How to publish your PWA onto the Google Play Store

Thanks to the Trusted Web Activity feature in Chrome 72 on Android, the Google Play Store is now open for Progressive Web Apps. Chrome 72 for Android is now shipping from the Play Store to all users and this version included Trusted Web Activity (TWA), that in a nutshell is a way to open Chrome …

Upgrading from React Native 0.53.x to 0.57.4 (and to Xcode 10 and Gradle 4 along with that), a journey

Back in November, after 6 months of working on other projects, I picked up development for the EV-Point Mobile App again. The app is built using React Native and is available on both iOS and Android. As Xcode got a new major release (from Xcode 9 to Xcode 10) since my last time working on …

Fix for the Android Emulator (Android Simulator) crashing during launch

UPDATE 2017.08.03: This should be fixed with the release of HAXM 6.1.1. Make sure you’re running the latest version of Android Studio On a recent project I was working on, I wasn’t able to start the Android Emulator/Simulator anymore from within Android Studio. Every time I launched it from Android Studio it would start, but …

Launching the Android Emulator from the Command Line

I’m not sure which update exactly broke it, but recently I got this when trying to launch the Android Emulator from the CLI: $ emulator -list-avds Nexus_5X_API_25 $ emulator -avd Nexus_5X_API_25 [140735953220544]:ERROR:./android/qt/qt_setup.cpp:28:Qt library not found at ../emulator/lib64/qt/lib Could not launch ‘../emulator/qemu/darwin-x86_64/qemu-system-i386′: No such file or directory Apparently there’s some relative path linking happening, which of …

Jasonette – Build cross-platform mobile apps using JSON

Just like how web browsers turn HTML into a web page, Jasonette turns JSON into iOS native components. This lets you build native apps by writing a simple JSON. Here’s a small snippet/example: { “$jason”: { “head”: { “title”: “{ ˃̵̑ᴥ˂̵̑}”, “offline”: “true”, “actions”: { “$foreground”: { “type”: “$reload” }, “$pull”: { “type”: “$reload” } …

Animating vectors in Android with AnimatedVectorDrawable

Seeing Lottie in action, I was reminded of Android’s AnimatedVectorDrawable which also allows one to do vector based animations. This class animates properties of a VectorDrawable with animations defined using ObjectAnimator or AnimatorSet. If you’re familiar with SVG, the AnimatedVectorDrawable XML contents will look familiar. The “Endless Pin Jump” animation (pictured above) for example is …