Making Animations In React Native— The Simplified Guide

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Apr 17, 2019

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The animations are an important part of the UX of an app, and interacting with the user using the animations create a better experience for the user, the most successful user experience are made with animations, that’s why we are goin to play around animations in React Native, technically React Native provide a great animations API that give us the ability to do different transitions and the animations .

New to React Native? check my article introduction to React Native check this out!

You may want how to style a React Native app and the options you can use to do the Job check Styling in React Native.

Now, what are we gonna is create animations like Fade,slideUp, slideDown, rotate ..etc. using the animations API.

Good to mention that we will be comparing the examples we are going to create with rnal (react native animations library) the library I’ve created a library that does all kinds of animations you may want to use. Learn more here!

First, of all to start using animations, we are using Animated module that react-native provides to do the magic things for us 💫

When building components, I’d advise using Bit to share and manage them across projects as a team- so you can build faster and stay in sync.

Learn more:

LayoutAnimation !!!

import {Animated} from "react-native";

Let’s start first with Fade :

Fade animation

The Animated method takes parameters as values and turns those values into animated values then we can use those values to animate our Components, okay! show me the code! 🤨 :

Let’s break it down!

First, we need to initialize a value so we can give this value to the Animated method :

state = {fadeValue: Animated.Value(0)};

Then let’s create a function called _start that will start our animations:

_start = () => {return Animated.timing(this.state.fadeValue, {toValue: 1, // output duration: 3000, // duration of the animation }).start();};

What we just did here? we used timing method from Animated , it takes some values:

• The first argument is the value we want to animate
• The second is an object of options to define how our animation should work.
• And finally, the start() callback that starts the animations!

Now we have an animated value, the next step is to use it to animate the component. we use Animated.View as a wrapper to our component in order to make the animations happen !

<Animated.Viewstyle={{opacity: this.state.fadeValue,height: 250,width: 200,margin: 5,borderRadius: 12,backgroundColor: "#347a2a",justifyContent: "center"}}><Text style={styles.text}>Fade </Text></Animated.View>

You see we passed the fadeValue to the opacity property so we can handle the opacity of the element so when the component start appears it happens smoothly and in an animated behavior! and that gives us the fade animation !

Now let's call the _start() function when an action is taken , in our case we call the function when button is clicked. you can trigger the function whenever you like for example within componentDidMount() .

<TouchableOpacity style={styles.btn} onPress={() => this._start()}>

Doing the Fade animation with rnal:

rnal made things for us more easy to create the fade animation:

First, let’s install the package :

With Yarn hit yarn add rnal , or npm run npm i rnal

Then Import The Fade element :

And:

Fade has startWhen props, it’s a type of boolean and it determines when the animation should start by default it starts when the component mount, you can discover more options to customize your animations, check out the docs.

Let’s try with something more awesome like making the component goes from the bottom or SlideDown animation. we will use the same code above but we need to change some values! and we will use interpolate method to interpolate the AnimatedValue cool let’s do it 🎩

SlideDown animation

Replace gif with the slideDown animation

The interpolate method takes an Object of properties.

• inputRange : The start point of the animatedValue: for example, we want the translateX to start from 1 level :

inputRange:[0,1]

• outputRange : gives us an outputRange based on the inputRange

transform:[{translateY:animatedValue.interpolate({inputRange:[0,1],outputRange:[-600,0]})}
]

Doing the same with react-native-animations-library! is more much simple, there is theSlideDown element so you can wrap the component you want to animate!

There are cases when need to make the animations to run indefinitely, Animated gives us Animated.loop() method to make this happen let’s see how it works! the best example to demonstrate that is to create a spinner!

Here we go!

What we just did is give the Animated.loop our animations as an argument to run it in a loop cycle.

With react-native animation library(rnal), you can just addinifinite props to make this happen!

import { Rotate } from "rnal";<Rotate infinite><Viewstyle={{height: 50,width: 50,margin: 5,borderWidth: 2,borderColor: "#888",borderBottomColor: "#8bffff",borderRadius: 50,justifyContent: "center"}}/><Text style={styles.text}>Fade </Text><View /></Rotate>

If you take a look at the examples above, we don’t actually change much, the same function we just determine where we use then animatedValue yeah it’s all about a value transformed to an animated value and allow us to do the animation we want using translate,scale, rotate and all other supported animations 😛 .

That was the way we run a single animation what about making a group of animations? sequence and parallel methods got you covred!

Run a group of animations

We can usesequence or parallel methods to run a group of animations, the two methods do almost the same job, the only difference is that parallel run the group of animations at once whereas the sequence method blocks the next animation until the previous animation is finished and done, and if one of the animations stops or break the next animation won’t be able to run. you can explore more about the two methods in the official docs.

• Using parallel method:

With sequence :

I think we are gonna stop at this point we don’t want to make this post longer. generally, there is much to talk about React Native animations and it’s a huge subject we won’t be able to cover it in one post we will have a chance to talk about other parts in upcoming articles but anyway we just covered the most parts of it and you will be able to create your own animations after reading this article. you can always use the react-native animations library I’ve created it’s so simple and easy to use. Thanks for reading, and please comment below!

Hi, my name is Said Hayani I created subscribi.io to help creators, bloggers and influencers to grow their audience through newsletter.

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