react-rxjs is the library we've been using to connect our React components to view models and consume observables. However, after spending some time with react-rxjs, I feel that it's a very heavy-handed solution. It requires us to sprinkle <Subscribe /> and <RemoveSubscribe /> components all throughout the code, and makes React go through an extra render cycle whenever we mount a component that binds to a view model. What I really want is a lightweight React hook that just gets the current value out of a plain observable, without any extra setup. Luckily the observable-hooks library with its useObservableEagerState hook seems to do just that—and it's more actively maintained, too!
Here I've implemented an MVP for the new unified grid layout, which scales smoothly up to arbitrarily many participants. It doesn't yet have a special 1:1 layout, so in spotlight mode and 1:1s, we will still fall back to the legacy grid systems.
Things that happened along the way:
- The part of VideoTile that is common to both spotlight and grid tiles, I refactored into MediaView
- VideoTile renamed to GridTile
- Added SpotlightTile for the new, glassy spotlight designs
- NewVideoGrid renamed to Grid, and refactored to be even more generic
- I extracted the media name logic into a custom React hook
- Deleted the BigGrid experiment
