React Native, is a version of React, that can be used to build native iPhone (and iPad and other iOS devices) and Android applications. It lowers the bar significantly for building on these platforms, meaning you can develop in comparatively simple React Javascript, and have that cross compiled to various devices.

This is all pretty neat.

Some time ago, I began work on a native iOS client for Known. I got quite a way to getting it all to work – you can log in, post status updates, photos and even check in.

However, I simply no longer have time to maintain it, and quite honestly I never figured out the last step of getting the code on Testflight or the App Store.

So, rather than let this languish in a folder on my laptop, I figured I’d stick it out there. Hopefully it’ll be useful to someone, and hopefully someone might have some time to help maintain it.

Sorry in advance for my spaghetti code, I’m far from being a React developer!

» Visit the project on Github...

For those following Known’s bleeding edge repo should be interested in a number of changes recently merged in.

First is tentative support for the new PHP 8, released at the end of last month. At the time of writing, we’re still waiting for Travis CI to catch up, but it seems to be working ok.

Second, is a fairly large set of data model changes which sets the stage for some work we hope to do next year.

First, I’ve switched away from the Mongo inspired md5s (on MySQL at least) to using v4 UUIDs for object addressing. This is more industry standard, and is wider supported.

Second, I’ve introduced a site collection. This identifies the site’s host, and gives us a nice entity to hang site specific information off of in the future. Crucially, entities will now be tagged with the site they were created on in a persistent way.

One immediate thing this gives us is a much more robust way for doing multi-tenant in a modern cloud environment.

My intention is to build on this concept going forward, and possibly even use it as an addressing mechanism for reader functionality.

Anyway, heads up if you’re following master. Take a backup before updating!