Just a quick check-in.
It's going fine. Right now I'm in The Netherlands taking care a of a cat for a friend traveling.
That's the beautiful kind of freedom, my current circumstances allow me to have.
But I know it is not going to last forever, unless I make something valuable.

I'm working on an app now, which is going to be a different take on social platform.
I don't want to share too much as of now, but it is taking shape well.

It's an ambitious project to pull off. I expected to be finished by now, but there is just a lot to it.
Especially the mobile front-end takes a lot of time to get perfect.

While Expo and React Native are good platforms that indeed are battleproof, I have had to cut many corners in terms of performance and getting what I want from visuals.
Especially low end Android suffers. Skia Canvas does help, but it also takes a long time to set up properly.
But that's also cool, because I guess it gives me a competitive advantage to have plowed through those obstacles.
I've managed to get a fairly complex app very snappy, even on the older phones.

It can be a tough balance to find, between fine-tuning and leaving as it is.
From now on, I try to not be too much of a perfectionist.

I would never really say I was too much of a perfectionist anyways. But I always hate to use apps that are not snappy.
I think that the foundation of a good user experience in an app is how responsive it is to your actions.

A lag-less and snappy software is in my book the minimum you can do for your user, other than of course providing stable functionality.
Then there is of course all the measurements that goes on top, all the research needed to test if it is even a viable project for a broader market.

That test I also haven't conducted yet. And that's also part of the reason why I want to finish this project soon.
Because until I am finished, I work in the dark, and it would be nice if a project of mine eventually saw the shapes of day as well.

There is already a beautiful ecosystem set up, that I'm proud to have made.
I'm looking forward to soon share it all. There is a lot to come! It's an exciting time for sure.

I wish you a wonderful day, thanks for reading - you are appreciated.

Object Storage Pricing Comparison

I'm shocked to find that people rely on the big boys (S3, Google Cloud Storage, etc.) for Cloud Storage.
They're really expensive compared to the pricing I found on lesser known services.
Perhaps people trust in the bigger companies?
Let's check all of them out.

Why?
For my upcoming app, I needed a platform to store all the user-generated media files.
That includes images and audio tracks, and also a decent amount of text.
A Managed Object Storage service was what I was looking for.
I spend a few hours researching the different platforms.

Okay, just give me the results
Here's a link to a downloadable Google Spreadsheet.

Estimated usage
I estimated I would have around 2Tb of storage and 1Tb of bandwidth / month.
Here's the pricing as of now (2024, April 9th):

2TB storage, 1TB bandwidth / month

Video of research

In this video you can how I summarized the above.
It's pretty boring to watch since I just visit the websites, but I recorded it and thought ah well I might as well upload it.

React Native Skia works wonderfully.
I've managed to seamlessly integrate it with Reanimated 3 as well.
I even have the touch listeners directly on the Skia components.

It automatically overlays the Skia view with the Animated.View and binds it.
To achieve this, I created an extension of the skia canvas, along with a react context for the components to communicate the touch components to.

That in turn gives me this delicious setup:

This allows the same flexibility that the standard React components offer, in the sense that you can connect the onPress listener directly to a Skia component.
To me, this is just beautiful and will be one of the things that will soon allow me to fly very fast.

Thankful for Skia as well, that library performs so well.
Excited to see how far I can take this stack.

I'm considering doing Skia tutorials as well, in the same style as @wcandillon does along the way.
Let me know if this is something you would want.

So what happens under the hood?

All of this happens through a custom context and a custom hook.

And then finally, the button component with touch handlers can be implemented like so:

Where the TabGesture component looks like this:

And that gives us this magical setup:

And then in the button, you can trigger the onPress event from the props like so (or however you want your component to trigger the event):

That's about it!
I hope you got inspired for your own Skia setup. Since all of these libraries are new, I find it interesting to see new uses of Skia pop up.
 
Thanks for reading 😊 Comments, likes and subscriptions are always appreciated, and can be done so annonymously.

This site is now in a state I'm happy with.
If you're new here, I wish you a warm welcome.

I'll soon post something introducing what's gonna happen. 😊

Also, all commenting, liking, disliking is anonymous - so just go nuts.
Any thoughts? Just write them. Or if you want to ask a question, you can do that above.
I'll be answering questions as they roll in on this page you're on now. I'll try to answer everything.
Enjoy for now! There is a lot to come.

And for those of you who have liked, commented or subscribed already:
Thanks! I really appreciate it!

It's incredible how much you can get done in a day when you have your own schedule.
Time really goes by so slow, and I get much more out of the days.
It's really wonderful.

So, this is the first post of a lot to come. I'm very tired & happy as I write this. Finally, this setup with my custom CMS & custom WYSIWYG editor is up and running, and is in a state where I'm somewhat satisfied with it.
I'll explain the details in-depth later, but yeah. Just had a wonderful day and the night coding session was super productive as well. A lot is to come, and I will do my best to live up to the expectation I now have surrounded myself with. I'll try my best to stay in line about what is to come. Much love from a tired and very happy Wituz.