🎨 Splash Screen: Kill the White Flash of Death

Properly configured splash screens prevent the dreaded white flash during app startup:

// app.json
{
  "expo": {
    "plugins": [
      [
        "expo-splash-screen",
        {
          "backgroundColor": "#232323",
          "image": "./assets/images/splash-icon.png",
          "dark": {
            "image": "./assets/images/splash-icon-dark.png",
            "backgroundColor": "#000000"
          },
          "imageWidth": 200
        }
      ]
    ]
  }
}

Control splash screen programmatically:

import * as SplashScreen from 'expo-splash-screen';

// Prevent auto-hide
SplashScreen.preventAutoHideAsync();
// Set animation options
SplashScreen.setOptions({
  duration: 1000,
  fade: true,
});
// Hide when app is ready
useEffect(() => {
  async function prepare() {
    try {
      // Load fonts, make API calls, etc.
      await Font.loadAsync(MyFont);
      await loadUserData();
    } catch (e) {
      console.warn(e);
    } finally {
      setAppIsReady(true);
    }
  }
  prepare();
}, []);
const onLayoutRootView = useCallback(() => {
  if (appIsReady) {
    SplashScreen.hide();
  }
}, [appIsReady]);

Pro tips for seamless experience:

- Match colors: Use the same backgroundColor as your first screen
- Proper timing: Hide splash only after content is ready to render
- Dark mode support: Always provide dark variant for better UX

React Native Hub

Hey guys👋

I just dropped a new article on how to style React Native apps the right way — best practices, tips, and examples included.

👉 Check it out: The Complete React Native Styling Guide

Let me know what you think!

React Native Hub

React Native Date Picker

This library solves the problem of implementing Date/Time picker components in your app.

· Fully native implementation for all platforms
· TurboModules support
· Modal and inline modes
· Extensive customization options

React Native Hub

Expo SDK 54 Released

Yesterday Expo announced the release of SDK 54. Here are the highlights and what you need to know when upgrading.

☑️ Faster iOS builds — dependencies are now precompiled XCFrameworks

☑️ iOS 26 support — new Liquid Glass icons + expo-glass-effect for glass UI 🔥

☑️ Edge-to-edge on Android enabled by default

☑️ Better updates — progress tracking, custom headers, and new reload options

☑️ New packages — expo-app-integrity, stable expo-file-system, improved expo-sqlite

☑️ Breaking change — Legacy Architecture ends with SDK 54

👉 Full changelog: expo.dev/changelog/sdk-54

👋 I wanted to share a library I recently came across — 

react-native-animated-glow

It's a free, open-source package for adding animated glow effects to buttons, images, and UI elements. The cool part? There's a visual builder on their site where you can tweak animations, see results in real-time, and just copy the code. Super satisfying to play with.

It could be nice for those key moments where you want users to feel something — like confirming a payment or highlighting a premium feature.

A bit of design inspiration 🔥

https://x.com/jamesm/status/1987905256143868064

Google Released Their Cursor Alternative

So Google released Antigravity (https://antigravity.google) — their answer to Cursor and other AI coding tools.

The interesting part? They’re positioning it differently. Instead of just “write code faster,” they’re saying:

focus on building solutions, not writing individual lines of code. The emphasis is on AI agents and integrated AI experience throughout the development flow.

UPD: Google has already published an introductory course

Let me know what you think. If there’s enough interest, I’ll dive deep and share what I find.

💸 Save Money on Expo Builds

Found a really cool tool that helps generate GitHub Actions workflows and build Expo apps using GitHub free plan.

The basic Expo plan at $19/month gives you at most:

· 30 Android builds or
· 15 iOS builds

With expobuilder, you can use GitHub Actions’ 2000 free minutes, which is roughly enough for:

· 200 Android builds or
· 20 iOS builds per month (macOS uses free minutes x10)

🔧 How does it work?

· expobuilder generates a workflow that uses expo-cli –local to build on GitHub runners

· you need an Expo account and a generated Expo Token

· even if you’re not familiar with GitHub Actions, you can set up a CI/CD pipeline from scratch by following the instructions

🔐 Setting up secrets:

· you only need EXPO_TOKEN to get started

· for notifications and store publishing - add the other keys

☁️ Build storage:

· artifacts are saved in GitHub Releases by default, but you can connect your own storage

This is a legit money-saver if you’re building frequently.

Have you tried building Expo apps with GitHub Actions? Would love to hear your experience!​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

A new interview with Ilya Sutskever has recently been published

Ilya co-founded OpenAI and was one of the key minds behind GPT. In 2024, he left OpenAI to start Safe Superintelligence Inc — a company focused on building safe superintelligence with safety at its core

Here are the main points he talked about:

1. Models today can crush benchmarks, ace IQ tests, and solve olympiad-level problems. But they struggle with real-world tasks. The current training approach has hit a ceiling.

2. The "throw more compute at it" formula is exhausted.
What matters now isn't adding more power — it's discovering new training methods. We have enough compute, but it's not delivering the exponential gains we used to see. The focus is shifting to new algorithms and research with existing models.

3. The difference between a model and a human? Humans learn fast from tiny amounts of data. We literally build our worldview from fragments of information and self-correct along the way. AI needs to consume entire knowledge bases and still struggles with context. Bottom line: humans are way more efficient learners right now.

4. Interesting take on AGI: it's not a model that knows everything. It's a model that knows how to learn. When that happens, progress will accelerate dramatically. Why? Millions of AI workers learning like humans, but faster. That's going to shake up the job market hard.

5. AI can't verify its own actions yet. Humans have emotions, intuition, that gut feeling when something's off — it's a feedback system. AI just executes functions. Without this mechanism, it's unreliable.

6. Big models will be rolled out gradually so society can adapt. Just like GPT existed and functioned for 3 years before being shown to the public.

The overall picture? We're not racing toward one massive Skynet. Instead, we're heading toward specialized AIs, each mastering its own domain. Once we crack that, we'll clone millions of copies — and that's when the real shift begins. Some roles will vanish, others will survive.

So what should we do? Learn to work with these tools, not against them. And double down on the skills that can't be automated

watch interview

DeepSeek introduces open-source V3.2 models with Speciale variant matching Gemini-3.0-Pro on hard reasoning

DeepSeek’s new V3.2 models arrive like a sequel that actually fixes the plot. The setup is simple: developers want open models that think, plan, and act with the precision of top proprietary systems.

The problem is that long-context reasoning and agent workflows usually break when attention costs spike or post-training budgets run thin.

The insight came from studying where open models fall short: slow attention, weak RL signals, and limited agent data. DeepSeek answers with a redesigned attention layer and a scaled reinforcement learning pipeline that treats reasoning as a first-class target.
The standout moment comes from V3.2-Speciale, which reaches gold-level scores on the 2025 IMO, CMO, ICPC, and IOI and matches Gemini-3.0-Pro on complex reasoning.

Key features and results:

• DeepSeek Sparse Attention reduces long-context compute without hurting accuracy.

• Reinforcement learning uses over 10% of pre-training compute to sharpen reasoning.

• Agent data spans 1,800 environments and 85,000 prompts for stronger generalization.

• V3.2-Speciale matches Gemini-3.0-Pro on demanding reasoning benchmarks.

• Open weights on Hugging Face support fine-tuning with LoRA or full training.

#WeeklyDigest №1

🔹 OpenAI released GPT-5.1 with 400K context, 128K output, priced at $1.25/$10 per million tokens. The model scores 76.3% on SWE-bench Verified, 88.1% on GPQA Diamond, and 94.0% on AIME 2025.

🔹 Codex also got updated, including the most powerful version yet — GPT-5.1 Codex Max. It scores 77.9% on SWE-Bench Verified. However, it's currently only available in Codex CLI and Codex plugins. They promise to add it to the API soon.

🔹 xAI released Grok 4.1 — the model became much more empathetic and sensitive, with improved creative writing. Though it falls behind GPT-5.1 on major benchmarks and isn't available in the API yet. However, they did add grok-4-1-fast-reasoning and grok-4-1-fast-non-reasoning versions to the API. 2M context window, $0.2/$0.5 per million tokens. Overall, not particularly interesting for programming tasks — waiting for the updated Grok Code.


🔹 One of the most interesting developments: a new data structuring format for working with models is gaining momentum — Token-Oriented Object Notation (TOON). The format surpasses everything in tokenization efficiency: from XML to JSON and even CSV. There are already tons of adapters and converters available online for the new format.

🔹 Cursor in version 2.1 improved Plan Mode, updated the search functionality (now faster and more accurate), and added AI Code Reviews with the option to run automatically on every commit (can be enabled in settings).

🔹 Qoder released a beta version of their IDE for Linux and launched plugins for JetBrains IDEs.

---
P.s: Hey everyone! This is the first edition of our new Weekly Digest — I'll be sharing the most interesting dev and AI news every week. Let me know what you think!

#TipsAndTools

Hey frontenders👋, this one's for you: the legendary icon library and toolkit just got even better

It recently updated again and grew to impressive scale — 63,119 icons, 30 styles, a full SVG library, and font ligatures that work like normal text.

What's new:
▫️ Refreshed design with new icon sets

▫️Official NPM packages for React and other frameworks

▫️CDN, SVG packages, fonts — use whatever works for you

▫️Everything rebuilt from scratch, no legacy baggage

Here's the link — enjoy!

I enjoyed Andrej Karpathy latest insight — clean, simple, and actually useful.

He reminds us that LLMs are simulators, not independent entities. And honestly, this shift in thinking changes how you interact with them.

Instead of asking:
“What do you think about xyz?”

Try this:
“What group of people would be best suited to discuss xyz? What would they say?”

There’s no “you” in there. The model doesn’t hold opinions or think things through the way we do. It hasn’t reflected on the topic and formed a stance. When you force it into a “you” framing, it still responds — but it’s essentially adopting a personality vector drawn from training data statistics and simulating it.

That’s fine. It works. But there’s far less mystery here than people assume when they ask questions to “artificial intelligence.”

This is what good prompting advice looks like)