Giving old projects some love
Revisiting a campus guide app to keep up with store requirements, and finally trying out @expo/ui's squircles and glass views.
Continuing my trend of (trying to) stop procrastinating on my side projects, it's time to give some of my old projects some love. That's the worst part about cross-platform development: having to set aside time to comply with store requirements that appear out of nowhere (I'm looking at you, 16 KB page size), while also keeping up with the latest UI trends, both on the native side and in whatever RN is up to.
Also, when you're working on a ridiculously big codebase with a ton of developers, making big changes is very time-consuming (e.g. bumping RN's version, adding cool new libs, changing how bottom sheets are rendered, moving from bare RN to Expo), so many of them stay in backlog purgatory forever. That's the cool thing about revisiting old projects: they're basically a blank canvas you can break time and time again trying to make shit work.
This one's a small project I worked on alongside my university's Department of Architecture and Urbanism. It aims to be a sort of interactive guide to where the works of art and architecture around campus are, along with a few bits and pieces about their history. For those who aren't aware of just how big UnB is (and why this project matters): it covers 42,523,571.56 ft² (or 3,950,569.07 m² if your country measures things the right way). It's HUGE. That's why this thing exists.
So, while fiddling with this, I finally got to try out the @expo/ui Swift package, mainly to get my hands on proper squircles and glass views. I used to hate those, but I think Apple finally got them right. Coming to an App Store near you very, very soon!