Build hybrid apps with the Ionic Creator

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Annoying.

It's angular, with cordova/phonegap packaged alongside it, and then a whole load of ionic sauce in the form of css and angular directives to make the thing work on mobiles in a polished way. They're doing stuff like catching every touch event and doing debouncing, while actually improving performance. Some of it is quite impressive.

I'd recommend it if you need to make an angular app look and behave like a native app as much as possible.

Unfortunately if you want to deviate from ionic's currently small pool of iOS-ish design metaphors, then it's not flexible at all, that's what you sacrifice for having everything else work with minimum fuss. I believe they are working on remedying this, there's lots of stuff on the issue tracker about enabling iOS Mail style layouts and so on.

In the end, it's just angular, and ui-router: this is its strength. Take a look at the repo.

Ionic is a framework that allows you to create mobile apps using Cordova. You write html/css/js and then use Cordova to generate platform specific code. This is what wiki has to say on "Hybrid" apps -

The resulting applications are hybrid, meaning that they are neither truly native (because all layout rendering is done via web views instead of the platform's native UI framework) nor purely web-based (because they are not just web apps, but are packaged as apps for distribution and have access to native device APIs).

The awesome thing about Ionic is that you have suite of cool widgets and components that are commonplace in mobile like the a header, sidemenu etc. (most of these are created using AngularJS directives). So instead of hand crafting the code for these UI elements, Ionic gives you a nice starting point to build such kinds of apps quickly and easily.

Ionic's toolchain is also delightful to use and much less intimidating than Cordova (or Phonegap) IMHO. If you're looking at building a mobile app which does not require esoteric native APIs and want it to deploy on multiple platforms - give Ionic a shot.

Drifty (creators of Ionic) recently raised a million dollars in funding.

With the additional funding, the founders plan to now focus solely on developing Ionic further, with plans to improve gestures and animations, plus roll out mobile services in 2014 that would make using Ionic a viable alternative to native app development. Areas of focus include things like analytics, notifications, and testing service. These would help the company generate revenue from its free platform.

Source: http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/10/drifty-makers-of-the-ionic-...

thank you!