I'm curious about animations. That is one thing React hasn't really figured out on the web. I think the last experiment I saw was to do all the animations manually using component state. I wonder if this is the same on Native?
Ideally a cross pollination of ideas about animations would make both ecosystems better.
I've done a bit of work on React Native animations. We are mostly working on two experimental animation APIs.
One is implemented fully in JS and is used when we need to implement gestures and respond to ongoing touch interactions. This is tricky because we need to be very careful to keep our JS frames very short and fast during the gesture, avoiding expensive allocations and making sure we don't try to process too much data in Relay.
The other API is much more magical. You configure the animation for your component immediately before a setState. The new layout is computed normally, but instead of directly updating the native views, we use POP[1] to animate to them on the main thread. This is a really easy-to-use API, but there are a few caveats.
We're still developing, stabilizing, and cleaning up these tools. It's great to hear your interested in this, we'll try to open something up before too long!
yes, this is a good question. I still have to implement drag and drop in a react project, and it seems the way to go is do this all through state? Which means none of the existing drag and drop solutions will work (any DOM manipulation without react knowing about it will cause trouble), and since react is relatively new there is seems there is still a need for good reusable animation components/mixins, and in the mean time, it's all a bit more manual work.
On over/drop you update your state and the view updates as appropriate yeah. Presumably some css transitions could make it pretty, I just went with straight updates as in my case it was only for personal use.
Ideally a cross pollination of ideas about animations would make both ecosystems better.