Internship 2018 – Fresh New Apps in React Native for PLAI Festival

As September is already here, we are preparing for one of the city’s important cultural events, Timisoara PLAI Festival. We appreciate the concept of the festival, the fact that it is organized 100% by volunteers and it’s objective to bring different cultures together for a few days.

As for the last 5 years, we are contributing by creating the PLAI Festival apps. Here is a sneak peek of how they will look like this year.

During the internship programs here at Cobalt Sign, we plan and create apps for the community. We think this is a great way to give back, to contribute to the festival & community and also believe it is a motivating and rewarding challenge for the interns at our company.

Ágota and Marius, our interns this year, together with their mentors, have been working on the PLAI Festival apps for the last two months. The apps are almost ready and we can’t wait to see them in the app stores.

We’ve been creating and updating the PLAI Festival apps since 2013, but this year we decided to start fresh with a new design, new set of functionalities, and rewrite the apps in React Native. We started with a new GitHub repo and a Trello board to keep things organised and then prepared the data structures and setup for Firebase, so we will have real-time data and push notifications. With a short intro and template of a React Native app with Redux, things started to slowly build up.

The PLAI Festival apps now have a fresh and minimalist design, according to the new design style of the festival. They have a simplified tab navigation, which is becoming more and more popular lately and will contain only the relevant info for attendees.

You will be able to see all the events and activities nicely organised by category and day, you will be able to mark them as favourites and you will receive push notifications from the organisers.

The new iOS and Android apps will be available shortly in the stores, grab them before the festival. See you there!