In my last post, I talked a little bit about React Native. Today, I'm here for a little rant about what I don't like about RN (or the reasons I will probably not use it again). These reasons may be somewhat biased towards how HTML and CSS work on the Web, but it reflects my opinion.

Let's get right into it:

Styling is a mess in React. This is the main problem I have with React. I love how it allows to create dynamic styles (using code to modify the styles) for the different components, however, I think it should be easier to apply the styles. For example, if there is two images in a view, it is required to go to both images and create a style property with the style we want for the image. This is were in my opinion, React's styles could be better, something like CSS where you can reference multiple elements/components with a single rule-set, and specifying the affected elements much easier. I know that CSS can get messy really fast, however, if done smart and modular, it offers an easier way to style the elements, compared to RN, even though it does not allow those "dynamic styles".

A few days ago, I started using Facebook's React Native. I had an idea for an app, and decided to give RN a try. I installed it, and tried to run the "example application", and could not figure out how to open the Developer's Menu in the Android Emulator to reload the code. Looked it up, and couldn't still open the menu. (BTW: I was on the right page, but didn't read it properly) So I immediately quit the emulator, uninstall everything, and go back to the Android Studio. Spent an hour creating some layouts, and an adapter for a list view, and went to bed. Next day, I wake up, and decide to give React Native another shot, because the layout that I made was bad, and it took me an hour to make it... Install everything again, and here we go, let's test the example application, change some code and try to open the menu, I glance at the same page, that I saw the day before and voilà, there it is the shortcut to open the damn menu... Great, let's see how fast I will be able to create something.

This week I had to implement a pagination system for the blog. Because, as I write more posts, the blog needs these kind of features. I started looking around at the blogs I read frequently, and ended up more confused on how to implement these pages than when I started.

Typically a blog presents in the first page, the most recent posts, with the most recent on top, which gives more visibility to the new content in the blog. This makes sense, to hook the reader with the most recent content, instead of old, an sometimes outdated content. However, this is here things get interesting. This first page is typically the page number 1 (one) of the blog, and they offer different types of mechanisms to navigate to older content. There is usually an archive by date of the posts, on a side bar, or the page offers pagination after the last post. We are going to focus on this pagination mechanism.

Let's start with this, blog pagination is weird, here's why. The first page of a blog, is usually numbered with number 1, and contains the most recent content on the blog, page number 2 contains content that is a little older, and so on.. This is contradictory to other things we do, for example, if you keep a diary, the most recent page is not the number 1, unless you are just starting your diary. What makes it even weirder, is that some blogs offer a link to navigate to the older posts, on the left side of the page, and to newer posts on the right side, implying that the older pages are to the left of the current one. Here is a image: