Building the Gyroscope App with React Native | Hacker News Reader

Building the Gyroscope App with React Native

blog.gyrosco.pe

100 pointsgoogletron22 comments

Another React Native app without an Android release. So far React Native's main advantage is for JavaScript developers that want to make an iPhone app. Which admittedly is probably a lot of people. But doesn't really make sense when you consider that Swift is a powerful modern language which will give you more capability and flexibility over the long-term because of being a first-class language annointed by Apple.

I agree. Folks that talk about how 'nice' it is to edit a React "Native" app layout with CSS.. It's like being happy about fixing airplane engines with chopsticks.

There's a clean and simple HackerNews reader for Android, iOS, and Web using React Native. Works pretty well. The developer even blogged about his experience making the app for all platforms.

It is called HackerWeb:

https://github.com/cheeaun/hackerweb-native

The product looks very appealing but I'm not willing to entrust any company with that level of personal data.

I'd be willing to pay to have a self-hosted version of Gyroscope. Curious if it's on the roadmap.

Self hosted version would make this much more appealing since all of that calculation would be done in real time on your own devices. I agree this would be ideal. Why do they need the data in the first place? What makes that data good for anything other than marketing?

Doubt it, that would go directly against every revenue model that have set up. Also it would be serving a tiny segment of the market.

Exactly. Every time I see post about gyroscipe here on HN I am amazed by such beautiful design and prezentation. I really like their location visualizations. But I am simply not willing to upload such personal data to some company.

For tracking my locations I use simple android app called GPSLogger which saves my location into files on my sd card (not sending it to some others copmuters).. and for visualization would like to have something like gyroscope but working only locally or self hosted..

Nice! I started using Gyroscope a few weeks back and think it is a fantastic app. Never realised it was written in React Native, and this has prompted me to look closer at this framework for our own development work.

It's kind of a misleading title as I was expecting to read more about React Native, but I was merely mentioned a few times. I was curious about how you generate the pictures for sharing? And how was the developing experience with React Native?

Congratulations for this amazing app though!

I will be writing something regarding that soon, this was more of designer perspective on react native.

What were you curious about re: card generation?

Looks absolutely gorgeous in the screenshots.

A small wish is that the app will use the apple ID rather than facebook ID. I don't have a facebook ID and I don't want one either.

I also wouldn't want the potential to have Facebook have access to all that data.

So excited to start sharing this. If you're a new user and prompted for an invite code, use "makingof"

The app looks great Anand! Cheers for such a good job.

How is the battery usage?

The app itself is not so bad - it depends on what other apps you sync it to. I have it synced to the "Moves" app on my iPhones to track my steps (as I lost my Fitbit a few weeks ago) and the Moves app tends to suck the battery dry.

I would envisage if I had a FitBit or Misfit etc. and synced it to Apple Health, then Gyroscope would simply pull the data from there in one hit without much of a battery slurp. I really need to go get a new Fitbit/Misfit and try it out though...

Just wanted to say - absolutely beautiful app. Looking forward to using this!

Your UIs look excellent. Why did you not go native? Were you afraid to walk the extra mile? Were you afraid that you couldn't create the shiny UI in Xcode?

Why work harder than necessary? What do you think the advantages of implementing the UI in Objective-C or Swift would be?

Transitions? Speed? Better code maintenability? A solid API?

React Native maps to native components and aren't any slower, and if you know react already the maintainability is probably better as well. If the native component isn't available you can write the bridge yourself, including a bridge to custom stuff you write in swift/android. That being said I would like to hear about some of the pain points the author went through making a complex react native app

React native is native

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