pablogdcr/daily-crumple

The Daily Crumple is a mobile app that presents itself as a satirical newspaper, but its real point is a set of highly detailed touch animations that make the on screen page behave like an actual physical sheet of paper. Instead of playing a pre made video clip when you interact with a page, the app takes a live snapshot of what is on screen the moment you touch it, then bends, folds, and stretches that image in real time as your finger moves, redrawn every single frame. Swiping between articles peels the current page off the stack the way pulling on real cloth would, with the fold shape depending on where on the page you grabbed it, so no two swipes look identical. Scrolling past the top or bottom of an article makes the sheet stretch into a wavy crumple against the edge before it relaxes back flat once you let go. Tearing off an article you do not want to read folds the corner over an advancing crease, gathers the whole page into a crumpled paper ball, and throws it into a wastebasket that rises up to catch it, revealing the next article underneath as though the pages were physically stacked. That crumpled ball is not a canned animation either. The page is split into eighty small triangular pieces, each one mapped onto a facet of a distorted sphere shape, and every one of those pieces is individually rotated, lit, and positioned every frame as it travels from its spot on the flat page to its spot on the ball. The project is built with React Native using the Skia graphics library for the custom shader based rendering, Reanimated to drive the animation frame by frame, and Gesture Handler for the touch interactions, on top of Expo. The articles inside are fictional and written as satire, and the app currently only runs by building it yourself, not through Expo Go.