For the 2nd Hack-a-thing, everyone in our group wanted to get more comfortable working with React Native since we're potentially looking to use React Native build our project. We intended to all follow the same tutorial http://cs52.me/assignments/sa/react-native/ from cs52 and then work on one unique component (per pair) that we might want to try for the project. Our pair chose to work on some kind of pop-up menu to later present questions to the users. We both had trouble with various popup m/c libraries so we just worked through a few tutorials to make sample apps.
David mostly focused on SampleApp and a Lynda colors tutorial. Emma focused on my-new-project, the cs52 tutorial. Both of us worked on popup.
It was good to get a jump into React Native, amazing how much of the tutorial has become obsolete (ListView
is deprecated), or components have been moved into different libraries. I'm also seeing how carefully we are going to have to think about the new UI libraries and components we introduce into the app, maybe only using ones above a certain number of stars on Github. The dependencies quickly balloon up and whenever my app experienced strange behavior or wouldn't build, it was because of an import statement for one of the libraries. It was a good exercise to get used to FlatView
and see how it works with old ListView
code.
React Native is probably still a good choice but we may save time building our own UI components when possible. Or we need to spend a good amount of time testing libraries.
I think we had the right idea about our approach to this hack a thing, but we ran into many roadblocks, such as neither of us being able to use the paraboly pop-up library or the multiple choice picker even though the components and UI for both seemed so simple.