TLDR: We’re making Expo Snack the official name of our prototyping tool which we first released as Sketch.

Sketch

About 2 weeks ago, we launched Sketch, a new tool for prototyping and sharing React Native screens, inspired by CodePen, JSFiddle and others.

We were really thrilled to see the community’s response:

We’re also incredibly excited by how much use it’s getting. In the last two weeks, we’ve seen tens of thousands of sketches saved for sharing, and users have collectively spent over 100 days on the Sketch site.

It’s been used in multiple bug reports on the React Native repository to provide easily accessible reproductions of reported issues.

We’ve also been incredibly flattered that the team building the Apollo Client GraphQL library is using Sketch on their landing page to demo their product:

And we’re very eager to see where it shows up next! We have a bunch of plans for improving the product, and we think more and more Expo and React Native developers will find it useful in their day-to-day work.

Naming is Hard

We’d be remiss in talking about the success of this project without acknowledging a major issue: the name. When we were building Sketch, we were aware of the name collision with Bohemian Coding’s Sketch product. We absolutely adore their app, and in a case of sketch-ception, the design and mockups for Expo Sketch were in fact made in Bohemian Coding’s Sketch. At the time, we thought that the two tools served such different purposes and are so dissimilar that there wouldn’t be any confusion.

We were wrong about that, and lots of people let us know in a diverse set of venues. While many commenters were *ahem* not particularly diplomatic, it was important to hear the underlying concern that the potential for confusion was much greater than we’d expected.

We grew increasingly certain that we’d want a new name so that there’d never be confusion from teammates’ talking about “sending over that sketch demo for the Sketch mockup,” and so that we’d leave open the future possibility of integrations between our product and Bohemian Coding’s.

Snack

We originally picked Sketch as the name for a lot of reasons, and wanted to have a new name that would still capture many of those but also didn’t cause users any confusion.

We think Snack is a pretty good name, and have decided to rename Sketch to Snack. Anyone familiar with Expo’s recent history will know that we have a bunch of practice renaming things, and this should go pretty smoothly. Links to https://sketch.expo.io will continue to work (go ahead, click it!), as will any previously generated embed codes.

New feature: embedding!

Did he just say embed codes?

He did! We hadn’t announced this formally yet, but if you have been using Snack recently, you may have noticed that after you save your snack you’re presented with an option to generate an embed:

The button bar after saving a Snack

Clicking Embed Code will present you with a modal:

An embed preview with the code available to copy

This embed code is what’s used on the Apollo landing page I linked above. If you want to embed a React Native demo anywhere on the web, try it out!

Let Us Know What You Think

Talk to us! We’re reachable in several places:

What would be a killer feature for you to have when using Snack? Yes, we know that you would like to be able to include any NPM package! We’re looking into it. What else?