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ccheever

Hi! I worked on this and am happy to answer any questions about it :)

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My initial reaction was to associate this with Sketch App for Mac [1]. How do you plan to prevent confusion?

[1] https://www.sketchapp.com/

That was my initial reaction as well.

Yup.

Yeah same here. Sketch is a pretty widely adopted tool in web development so your audiences will very likely overlap.

I would re-consider the name sooner than later?

We thought it was such a different product that people wouldn't be confused at all. But if it turns out to be a problem, we'll figure something out. Thanks for the feedback!

How will you know whether it's a problem?

It sounds like you're turning a deaf ear to the fact that it is a problem. Both apps are used for designing applications (even though the functionality and what kind of design is different). I wouldn't be surprised if your mentors at YC have already advised you to change the name. And more people in this thread have commented on the name issue more than your product itself. "If it turns out to be a problem"- It's a problem alright.

Looks great!

One suggestion, I didn't notice the first time I visited the page that the modal window prompting to open the app was a modal, I thought that it required an app download. It didn't even occur to me to click somewhere else on the page and so I just closed the tab. It wasn't until I read the article that I realized you could use it on a desktop.

Ah interesting point. Maybe we could make the overlay slightly more transparent?

Or remove it entirely... You don't need to "scan" anything to "get started". So it's not even an accurate piece of guidance for the user. Or am I missing something?

Well you either need to scan or click the "Preview" button to open up Appetize. We thought it'd be good to push people towards the mobile apps since they have better performance.

Same here!

congrats on the launch! this is really cool

also reminds me a bit of shadertoy https://www.shadertoy.com

hopefully this will help the react native community grow even faster :)

Thanks! I really like how shadertoy show previews of each shader. Maybe that's something we could add eventually.

Also - you can use OpenGL with this: https://sketch.expo.io/rJiYksBse

Small suggestion: it would be awesome if the sketch homepage listed examples and had a quick screenshot or two. most people go to react.rocks and it looks like crap. https://react.rocks/tag/ReactNative

I totally understand why you need a "download the app before viewing" flow, but that requirement is now such a pervasive and hostile UX pattern for growth marketers that I bet many new visitors will just bounce before even clicking through.

Maybe you can show the live preview sidebar by default and also have a button that says "See live on your device" which prompts for download+QR

Right now the "Scan with Expo" landing page doesn't even make it clear there is code behind there! :)

ps: the openGL demo is crashing via Appetize for me within nothing in the logs

Those are all really good points. We wanted to push people to download the apps because the performance is so much better than Appetize, but maybe that's not the right tradeoff.

Thanks for letting me know the OpenGL demo is crashing, I'll take a look at that.

edit: It looks like we have a bug with our iOS simulator build. We'll update that but for now Android Appetize works.

The OpenGL issue is fixed now. :)

Here's an example with THREE.js: https://sketch.expo.io/rkpPMg8ie

Plain OpenGL: https://sketch.expo.io/SJaCWirsg

Hey, so I tried it out and wanted to see how well it functions as a "stand alone" app - I closed the expo browser tab and loaded the demo from the Expo menu, but it wasn't loading. Does the browser window need to be open by design, or is it a bug?

Also, is there a way for general expo apps to get their own launcher (on Android at least)?

Great work by the way, this is really awesome.

The browser communicates with the device via PubNub to send the code. So it needs to be open when previewing the app. But being able to view it on the phone without the browser is useful. Thanks for the feedback.

If you click save and then re-scan the QR code, that url should work without the webpage open. Let me know if it doesn't work.

I just downloaded the iOS client, scanned the QR code on my computer, and the client briefly flashed up what I think matched the sketch's code, then took me to a camera screen displaying 'open up sketch.expo.io and scan the QR code to get started!'

Any ideas? Idea looks very promising. Thanks

The problem was that my computer was on a corporate Wifi that wasn't allowing pubnub to work. Perhaps a more helpful error message is worth considering? Anyway, thanks for creating this tool, will enjoy checking it out.

This is really cool!

I have been using Exponent (Expo) on a side project for 5 months and love it.

Can I ask what editor this is built on? I've been considering for another project having a "live editor" for writing extensions, and this is the best ES6 + linter I've seen!

Is any of this app open source?

Will we be able to add external components?

You cannot do that right now. There are a few libraries already bundled which you can use. But we are planning to work on adding this feature.

Or maybe if I create a custom component inside sketch, it would be nice if it's added as a template in the components toolbar.

That's a great idea! We need to add an accounts system before we can do that, but I'll add that to our list.

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