In today's post, I'd like to share with you how I conditionally render components in React Native. Let's say you want to show a Log In button for unauthenticated users, and a Log Out button for user's who have authenticated. How would you go about doing this?

In this post I'll be going over how to create a fullscreen background image for your views in React Native. While I'll be focusing on fullscreen images in particular, this will actually directly apply to any background image, fullscreen or not.

In Part 2 we created the layout and style of the calculator, but it still doesn't do anything. In Part 3, we'll continue from where we left off by handling touch events, performing the arithmetic, and updating the calculator UI using State.

In Part 1 we went through the setup of a 'Hello, React!' application. In Part 2, we'll continue from where we left off and begin laying out and styling our calculator app.

React Native promises a whole new way of developing native Android and iOS applications, using (primarily) a single codebase based on the React framework for web. The idea is to write your core application in JavaScript and React Native will compile native iOS and Android applications.

Since Xcode 6, enterprise distribution has no longer generated the required P-List for distributing your iOS application. This tool handles generating it for you, and can be easily used as part of your Continuous Integration process when automating builds.

I've just published my iOS and Mac OS library for asynchronous image downloading, aptly named AsyncImageDownloader, to CocoaPods.

A common issue I have seen with various code snippets around the internet is that developers are unwittingly downloading images synchronously in iOS (or Mac OS for that matter) apps, causing the application to freeze as the main UI thread is blocked. This is poor practice for a number of reasons, but the main issue is that the app appears to be unresponsive while the image is downloaded. Depending on the connection of the device, this can severely harm the usability of your application.

XOR encryption (or Exclusive-OR encryption) is a common method of encrypting text into a format that cannot be trivially cracked by the average person. XOR encryption is great for storing things like game save data, and other data types that are stored locally on a users computer, that while not a big deal if they are tampered with, you would like to deter people from doing so. XOR encryption is also used often as a part of more complex encryption algorithms.

Like so many of the iOS UI components, the UITabBarItem is very easy to customize and manipulate. This post will show you how to add some basic customization to your tab bar, by defining custom images for each tab based on the state of the tab. By default, a blue tint is applied to the selected tab, but we can go further than that by completely changing the image, or applying our own tint to...

Something that is very common in user interface design is to have a repeating background image on your views. The image is normally very small, and repeats across your view's background to give it more texture or style than a flat background color. This trick is often used for simple gradients, providing better performance than programmatically drawing the gradient on the view, but it can also be used for textures or more complicated gradients to...