Hi there!

This week UI Kitten received a new major version update: 5.0-alpha. We're really happy to see how UI Kitten evolved from a concept of having configurable styles to a full-featured component kit based on our own customizable design system Eva. Hope you're also excited about that.

In this release you can expect following things:

• Declarative API for rendering nested components
• Smaller bundle size
• Bug hunt
• React Native 0.62 and Expo SDK 37 support
• Live examples in documentation.

Let's quickly go through each of them.

Declarative API for rendering nested components

As we've been using UI Kitten ourselves, we've mentioned that sometimes that API components provide is not really flexible. In particular, a lot of components had text property, which was very useful, but not really great when you need to do something with that text. In particular, style it somehow.

Starting from version 5, UI Kitten switches to declarative API, which means that the above mentioned text property is now passed as child of the component. We believe, that it will open more possibilities for developers to customize the components. Despite we still like that our design system brings structure, we understood that sometimes you just need a bit more flexibility.

Smaller bundle size

UI Kitten 5 bundle size is 35% smaller. We understand, that this might not be really critical on mobiles. But it's quite important for React Native Web version. Let us know how your bundles size changed after migration!

Bug hunt

We're constantly working on improving the quality of the framework and listen for the feedback on GitHub. We've made a quite serious bug hunt, trying to fix bug and work on user improvement request. As a result 20+ issues were closed.

React Native 0.62 and Expo SDK 37 support

Our goal is always to keep UI Kitten and Kitten Tricks up to date. Now you can enjoy latest versions of React Native and Expo. Mobile Bundle updates are on it's way!

Live examples in documentation.

As we support React Native Web. We were able to implement live web preview of our components in browser. Now you don't need to install demo app to get the idea how it is working. Moreover, we added detailed description for each component as well as more examples for each of them. Just check our UI Kitten documentation!

What's next?

During this hard coronavirus-times we sometimes it can be quite hard to plan for long. In any case, below you can find a list of things we want to focus further:

• More components. We have a tons of user requests on implementation complex components like Table and Time Picker
• Kitten Tricks and Mobile Bundles are going to be updated to latest versions soon
• Adding animations for modals and probably for other components

Feel free to leave feedback about our framework and we will be happy to see you among this users! If you have a project you have built with UI Kitten which you want to share, feel free to add it to this issue.