Click through to check out the changelog compiled by @vjeux! Keep your eyes peeled for another release coming later today to fix an issue with the WebSocket polyfill.

Skip to 11:30 for the start of the interview! @nicklockwood does incredible work on React Native, so this is well worth a listen.

@mfikes and @dnolen continue to make progress on integrating ClojureScript and Om, this quick video looks promising - a ClojureScript browser-based tic-tac-toe is ported to React Native with minimal changes. Github repo here

Very cool to see other JS frameworks making moves into native mobile! Check out the Github repo here and a video of it in action on Android here.

Powered by the brilliant and generous folks at @appetizeio, @jsierle's and I have added an embedded simulator to React Native Playground! What this means to you: you can write simple React Native apps in the browser and share them with reckless abandon.

I would like to emphasize that this is only possible thanks to @appetizeio kindly sponsoring the project to help out the React Native community. Check them out, they'll host any iOS or Android app for 100 minutes free per month so you can send it off to clients or whoever wants to play with your app without asking them to get set up in TestFlight or whichever tool you use. They also integrate with Jenkins, and could be a great way to test your app.

Another great use case: I'm giving a presentation on React Native next week and I used their embed API to embed an iOS simulator into my slides, see here. If that isn't stupid cool then quite frankly I just don't even know what is.

A discourse-powered discussion board to bring the React community together. Also includes meetings notes from the React team to help you keep up to date on where React is headed.

Thanks to @hharnisc you can now you can use the W3C WebSocket api within your React Native app, via Square's SocketRocket! Or if you prefer, @kirkness put together a React Native wrapper around a Swift-based Socket.io client implementation - react-native-swift-socketio. As mentioned above in the 0.4.3 link, the polyfill is not working properly in the official release but a patch is on the way - you can pull in this commit if you want to get started with it right away.

Maybe I'm the only one that missed this, @ericvinencti dropped this nice little feature that you can enable by adding console.yellowBoxEnabled = true anywhere in your app and then use console.warn('message or js object here') to see a cute little yellow notification pop up on the bottom of your app. Use this for warnings or even debugging - quicker to see some data here than open up a Chrome debugger or sort through the XCode logs.

Screenshot on the bottom of the screen
Tap on the notification to see it full screen

It's been a long time coming and it finally has been merged, try it out with react-native new-library <LibraryName>

As of the time of writing, this has not been included in a tagged release so you will need to use the master branch to give it a try.

Slick animated segmented tab picker! Try it out in the simulator on rnplay.org

A popular effect for web and mobile apps today - a parallax scrolling header where the title text fades as you scroll down. When the image grows as you scroll up beyond the top, there seems to be a delay of about one frame in adjusting the size of the content view, it could be a fun challenge to jump in and fix this! If I wasn't writing this newsletter I would probably be doing it ;) Try it out in the simulator on rnplay.org

So you've already fallen in love with React Native, and maybe you've been spending a bit too much time on it, well now you can use this React Native app to help you and your partner strengthen your connection and love! Tacky byline, I know. The technique is actually backed by research and popularized by the New York Times article To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This. Click the above link to see the source or here to grab it on the app store.

Another React Native app has hit the app store! "just launched Mr. Dapper! It took us a week from first line of code to submission"

Our friends over at ReactNative.com have put together a nice list of utilities to help you interact with address book, email, phone calls and sms.