#100DaysOfCode: Day 18

Devlog for day 18 of my #100DaysOfCode coding challenge.

Checklist

Daily Requirements

1+ hour of coding #100DaysOfCode
Devlog

Extra Tasks

self study following my own syllabus
startup or personal project work
job related tasks
get involved with Open Source

Progress Report

So there’s been quite a bit of reading and experimentation since my last post. I’ve been coding consistently, but haven’t had the time to write a devlog. So these posts appear to be harder to keep up with than actual coding. I’ll try to revamp my daily habits to better accommodate writing to this blog. That said, here are the things I’ve touched on over the past few days:

react-native-permissions was painless to install and get working. I also learned that React Native has AndroidPermissions as a core API now. Quite cool, but I’ll be using this library for the time being since it’s a nice uniform API.
I played around with react-native-circular-action-menu which is a nice fork of react-native-action-button.
- The only issue was that I had to fork it to merge a PR that has been sitting there for a several months. It’s needed since PropTypes was deprecated and moved to a separate package. There’s one other PR that I hope will get merged but since the code isn’t very clean, I don’t think it’ll happen anytime soon. Instead, I’m actually considering maintaining this fork while waiting for the original maintainer to merge requests.
I added react-native-elements as a dependency after quite a bit of reading and deliberation. Reasons being:
- It only needs to link because of its dependency on react-native-vector-icons. Since I already use that package, there’s minimal work to use this UI library.
- I prefer a unified look on iOS and Android. I’m not chasing a native look on each since this is a solo project.
- It has the most stars and a very active community. It feels like a project that I might get myself involved with.
Did the native library setup that is required to use the CameraRoll API. It was actually pretty painless except for the lack of documentation on what permissions need to be added to your AndroidManifest.xml file to get this to work (it’s READ_EXTERNAL_STORAGE).
Lastly, I implemented a hacky way to get the aforementioned circular action menu button into the tab bar of react-navigation. There’s still a few bugs so I need to work on it a bit more before I can say that it actually works.
- Sidenote: There are still a TON of issues around TabNavigator which makes custom stuff like this really difficult. Most of them due to the way the original codebase was designed - tab navigation options are all defined statically and only in your navigator definitions. This makes configuration on a per tab basis stupidly difficult. I really hope this gets addressed at some point.

Oh, and I started answering React Native questions on StackOverflow again after a long hiatus. There are still some annoyances with doing that, but that rant is meant for its own blog post.

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#100DaysOfCode: Day 18

Checklist

Progress Report