Learn Android, Browserify and Mdx

MDX has grown rapidly since the first commit two and a half years ago. We'd like to celebrate our accomplishments so far, and talk about what lies ahead. We've got lots of plans.
Learn how MDX increases developer productivity, improves educational content authoring, and even peek behind the curtains to see how MDX works.

MDX is an authorable format that lets you seamlessly use JSX in your markdown documents. You can import components, like interactive charts or notifications, and export metadata. This makes writing long-form content with components a blast.



MDX Conf 2020

React is one of the web’s most popular frameworks for building JavaScript applications. 

If you know what you’re doing, React can drastically simplify how you build, use, and maintain code.

Whether you’re a React newbie or you’re ready for advanced techniques, you can level-up with egghead. Explore our in-depth courses, lessons, and community resources to build more powerful applications and crack open your career.

react

Progressive Web Apps can speed up app loading times, and even allow you to run your web app offline, and install it on a mobile device!  However, setting up a PWA correctly can be tricky.

In this course, we'll create a PWA from start to finish, using create-react-app.  We'll create a custom service worker, and use different caching strategies for different types of assets.

Finally, we'll look at how to install the app on both iOS and Android devices, and how to customize the app name, icon, and splash screen.

Course Introduction: Progressive Web Apps in React with create-react-app

Gulp is a toolkit for automating painful or time-consuming tasks in your development workflow, so you can stop messing around and build something.

gulp

Building upon the `watch` task that we begin this lesson with, we’ll look at how to create a local development server using the `app` directory as the web root. By using Browsersync to achieve this, we can also instruct all connected browsers to automatically reload each time our bundle is re-generated. Browsersync has a public `.stream()` method that is designed exactly for this purpose.

Gulp and Browserify - Adding Live Reload with Browsersync

Babel has support for the latest version of JavaScript through syntax transformers. These plugins allow you to use new syntax, right now without waiting for browser support.

babel

What is already a nice workflow using Gulp, Browserify, Watchify & Browsersync to enable auto rebuilds & live browser reloading can be further improved by adding Babelify. A simple wrapper around the popular transpiler Babel, Babelify can ‘transform’ source files as they pass through our stream to enable certain Javascript features not yet available in the Browser or Node. We end the lesson by looking at how to generate & extract sourcemaps using `exorcist`.

Gulp and Browserify - Adding Babel & Source Maps

React Native lets you build mobile apps using only JavaScript. It uses the same design as React, letting you compose a rich mobile UI from declarative components.

react-native

Learn to write components that render differently on iOS and Android, but present the same API. First, we'll use the Platform module to change behavior based on the platform. Then, we'll use the platform-specific file extensions, .ios.js and .android.js, to render platform-specific components.


Writing Platform-Specific Components for iOS and Android in React Native

Browserify lets you require('modules') in the browser by bundling up all of your dependencies.

browserify

Let's look at the basics of setting up Gulp and Browserify. Creating a Gulp task from scratch, we'll cover how to utilise the Browserify API to generate a single `bundle.js` file, catch and log any errors that occur in the compilation process, transform the stream into a format that can be consumed by `gulp.dest` and finish by writing the bundle to a `dist` directory.

Gulp and Browserify - Initial Setup

Beginning with a single Gulp task capable of generating a one-time Browserify bundle, we enable file-watching and incremental rebuilds by incorporating Watchify. We add a second task `watch` & refactor our initial code to enable the bulk of it to be re-used. We’ll look at exactly how to ‘wire’ these tools together and how the relationship between Watchify & Browserify can manifest into a seriously efficient workflow.

Gulp and Browserify - Hooking up Watchify

In this lesson, we will start with a list of content from a React Native FlatList that we will then transform into a three-per-row grid.

Display Contents of a React Native FlatList as a Grid

In this lesson, you will learn how to use the `SafeAreaView` component to avoid the sensor cluster (the notch) and home activity indicator on the iPhone X.

Use the SafeAreaView Component in React Native for iPhone X Compatibility

First, install redux with: `npm install --save redux` and install react-redux with: `npm install --save react-redux`

In the top level of your component tree, import `createStore` from redux, and use it to create a new store with a simple reducer:

`import { createStore } from 'redux'`

`const rootReducer = (state = {}, action) => {
  return state
}`

`const store = createStore(rootReducer)`

Also import `Provider` from react-redux:

`import { Provider } from 'react-redux'`

And then wrap your app's components with a `Provider` component, and pass in your `store` as a prop:

`<Provider store={store}>`
  `...`
`</Provider>`

Then, you can connect any sub components with the `connect` function, by first importing it:

`import { connect } from 'react-redux'`

And then calling it with a `mapStateToProps` or `mapDispatchToProps` argument, and then passing in the unconnected component:

`const ConnectedLoginGate = connect(state => ({
  username: state.auth.username
}))(LoginGate)`





Add Redux to an Existing React Native Application

iOS and Android come with several built in fonts, but if you want to use a custom font in your react native application, you'll need to add it first.

You can add a custom font by copying the font files to your project, telling react native where to find those files by adding an `rnpm` entry to your `package.json` file, and then linking them with `react-native link`. 

Then, you can use that new font by specify it as the `fontFamily` style for a `Text` component, and you can change the `fontWeight` or `fontStyle` component if you've added additional style and weight font files.



Add a Custom Font to a React Native Application

There are two ways to open urls in React Native.  One is to open, and switch to the device's web browser, and the other is to embed the web page within your application.

To open the mobile device's web browser, we'll import `Linking` from react native, and use the `openURL` function, which will open any url that starts with `http` or `https` in that web browser.

If you want to stay within your current application however,  you can import `WebView` from react native, and use that as a component in your application.  Pass in a `uri` param to display that web page in the embedded web view.

Open a Webpage in React Native with Linking and WebView

When you bring up the on screen keyboard in a mobile app, it will cover any text input or buttons on the bottom half of the screen, which can be frustrating for users.  There are a few common ways to deal with this in React Native - and this video shows the following solutions:

First, you can use the built in `KeyboardAvoidingView` to move components around when the keyboard comes on screen.  It has the advantage to being built in to React Native already - but it can be overly complicated to get this approach to work consistently across both iOS and Android.

There is also a third party library called `KeyboardAwareScrollView`, which will allow your entire view to scroll, and will keep the currently selected text inputs up and out of the way of the keyboard.

Prevent the On-screen Keyboard from Covering up Text Inputs

We’ll create a brand new React Native app, and get it to launch on the iOS simulator and Android emulator.  A Mac is required to build for iOS, but Android development can be done on Mac, Windows, or Linux.

Create a React Native App and Run it on the iOS Simulator and Android Emulator

Once your React Native app is up and running, we’ll make a simple change and reload the simulator to show the change.  We’ll look at manually reloading the simulator, reloading with Live Reload and reloading with Hot Reloading, and talk about the pros and cons of each method.

Reload the Simulator when Changes Occur in React Native Apps

Displaying text is a key component of mobile apps, so we’ll look at how to show text on the screen, and how it differs from text on the web.  We’ll also format the text style to change the size, alignment, and more.

Display and Format Text in a React Native Application

React Native uses Flexbox to layout most components, which makes it easy to run your app on devices of many different screen sizes.  We’ll learn the basics of Flexbox in React Native, and how to use it to build a flexible screen layout.  We’ll also look at some differences between flexbox on the web and on mobile.

Layout React Native Components with Flexbox

One way to style React Native components is with a `StyleSheet`, which was designed to be similar to css.  We’ll go over the differences between React Native styles and web styles, and we’ll create a new StyleSheet, and use it to change the style of components in our app.

Style Components in a React Native App with StyleSheet

In this lesson, we’ll accept user input for the first time with a text box.  We’ll operate the text input as a controlled component, and store the text value in our component state.  We’ll use that text input to perform a live search on the elements in the list.

Accept User Input with React Native TextInput

We’ll turn on remote debugging in the simulator, and log values to the console.  We’ll also look at the differences between `log`, `warn` and `error`, and turn off the yellow warning box in the simulator itself.

Write to the Console Log in a React Native App

React Native applications can be debugged with the Chrome debugger by inserting a `debugger` command in React Native.  Then, you can see all the variables and their values in the current scope, and even change the values, and continue execution.  We’ll also use breakpoints in the debugger, and learn how to pause on exceptions - all of which can be used to better understand what is happening during an error or exception case.

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