
Why React Native Is Different - jlongster
http://jlongster.com/Why-React-Native-is-Different
======
logicallee
After getting tired of scrolling (which reminded me of this
[http://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.h...](http://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html)
where you scroll through vast distances to appreciate how far apart things in
our solar system are) and noticing the huge headings separated by large
vertical whitespace, I had an idea: since the headings are so huge, I could
just zoom way out and see and read all the headings!

Unfortunately, the page outsmarted me and as I zoomed out, it somehow figured
out I was doing this and increased the font size so it's the same size it was
at 72 points when I was at 100% zoom.

Well, all right web designer. You "win". The amount of effort you put into
defeating my efforts to read your content is astounding.

~~~
jlongster
The amount of work is simple:

h1 { font-size: 5vw; }

The `vw` units are relative to the page width.

You would rather have to press the right arrow key 50 times? I find it to be a
whole lot faster to scroll quickly through content rather than forcing me to
click through every single damn slide.

EDIT: It is interesting that the vw/vh units don't take zoom into effect, I
hadn't thought of that. Interesting.

~~~
gdilla
actually, yes. Compared to scrolling football fields to get to the next item,
a one-push interaction would be better.

~~~
jlongster
Scanning through the content (going from slide 5 to slide 20) is far faster
with scrolling, at least with Apple's trackpad and OS X's scrolling inertia.
Maybe it doesn't work as well on other devices.

But it is useful to walk through each slide with a keypress, so I'll probably
add that feature as well. I want both.

------
iLoch
Alright so looking at the comments we've got one person complaining about the
naming of the framework, one person complaining about the argument of sexism
surrounding the use of the word "guys" in a gender-neutral context, one person
complaining about the UI of the blog itself, and one meetup recommendation.
(And now we have one comment complaining about the other comments, BINGO!)
Nice work HN!

James, thanks for the informative talks - I hope we can continue to push the
bounds of React Native and succeed in making it an obvious choice for
developers in the future. For anyone who hasn't tried it, I highly recommend
giving it a shot for any new app you work on. There's a lack of Android
support at the moment (it is about 5 months from release I believe), but at
the very least you'll speed up your iOS development significantly. It's hard
to justify native development now (for me, as a non-iOS dev) when you can, for
example, create a camera view in React Native with a single line of code.

~~~
jlongster
Thank you! I don't really care about poor comments (I've come to expect them),
but the only thing that makes me sad is that it triggered HN's "controversy"
mechanism and dropped the article about 20 places in a few minutes. When an
article gets more comments than votes, this kicks in.

Ah well, such is social media :)

------
shaohua
For people in SF, running similar meetup in the city as well

[https://www.meetup.com/SF-React-Native-Meetup/](https://www.meetup.com/SF-
React-Native-Meetup/)

------
tunesmith
I just wish people and companies would get over this "react(ive)" naming
fetish. It reminds me of back in the late 90's when everything was Web-this
and Web-that. It makes the distinctions really hard to google for. React,
reactive, functional-reactive, etc. Overloading gets in the way of learning
and progress.

~~~
tel
To be fair, the term "functional reactive" was invented by Conal Elliott and
Paul Hudak back in '97 [0] and has merely been co-opted recently by the
"reactive" buzz. Which is a shame since genuine FRP is quite a bit nicer than
most modern bits and pieces still.

[0] [http://conal.net/papers/icfp97/](http://conal.net/papers/icfp97/)

------
k__
Yesterday I read about NativeScript, which also seems to be a nice way to do
this kind of stuff.

They also seem to support native libs.

[https://www.nativescript.org/](https://www.nativescript.org/)

------
arcatek
> "To the women readers/watchers: I apologize for saying "guys" in a few
> places referring to groups of people"

As a non-native speaker, isn't "guys" a correct term regardless of the gender?

~~~
egh
No.

If I address a mixed gender group, and I ask that "all the guys" raise their
hand, everybody will know that I mean men only.

~~~
bennylope
And if you asked them, "Hey guys, raise your hand if you use the web" you'd
get men and women raising their hands. "the guys" != "guys" in this case. The
word is very - or awfully, depending on your point of view - ambiguous, and
can be used in a gender neutral/ambiguous way, like third-person plural
pronouns in other languages.

