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Build hybrid apps with the Ionic Creator

ionicframework.com

21–30 of 33 posts

Re: Build hybrid apps with the Ionic Creator

#21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, annoying that Ionic wants to beta test their new software package. How annoying of them.

Yes, but it's not an instant access beta program. So whilst I appreciate they want to beta it, I'd like to have a little play knowing that it's in beta.

Sorry for the confusion. It's not in beta yet. No one is using it and it's not quite ready. The list is for when that opens up, and we will be liberal about letting people in.

Re: Build hybrid apps with the Ionic Creator

#22
Surely this approach has gotta get some serious uptake soon/finally? For your average CRUD app, coding in iOS and Android (and web) makes little sense. Titanium was promising before it made the big shift to Alloy. Jquery Mobile is oddly "meh". Ionic looks quite nice so far.

I see 37 Signals is making this approach work, too (albeit with different tools): http://signalvnoise.com/posts/3766-hybrid-how-we-took-baseca...

Re: Build hybrid apps with the Ionic Creator

#23

I'm not familiar with Ionic. It describes itself as a framework for Hybrid apps, which sounds interesting, but all I can see described on the website is html and css. Anyone mind enlightening me on what that means here?

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…

I've been using Ionic for about a month now. For the most part, it's a great tool to get something off the ground. I'm not positive if it'll hold up to our expectations of a native app yet, but I'm optimistic. I have had a few issues as well though. Most of it has to do with understanding the intended app structure. The documentation is getting better though.

For example, getting ion-side-menu to work was difficult for some reason. Looking at the documentation now, it shows that the directive is a child of ion-side-menus and a sibling of ion-side-menu-content. I'm not sure if that was always there, but I didn't notice it until now. The framework has been going through some change as well, so some of the examples out there are already outdated.

Regardless, I think Max and the guys at Drifty are doing great. And it's exciting to see a Madison getting mentioned in the development community. Nice work guys.

Edit: Ionic, not Angular

Re: Build hybrid apps with the Ionic Creator

#26

I'm not familiar with Ionic. It describes itself as a framework for Hybrid apps, which sounds interesting, but all I can see described on the website is html and css. Anyone mind enlightening me on what that means here?

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…

If you're looking for flexibility in a Angular-driven framework for building mobile apps, you may want to check out Famo.us/Angular (github.com/Famous/famous-angular). The framework is still relatively young, but at 0.1.0 and nearly 5 months of development, it's gaining some traction. (disclosure: I'm a contributor)

The cool thing about Famo.us is that you can express animations imperatively, and the framework enables those animations to be GPU accelerated (i.e. "buttery smooth".) So imagine if jQuery animations were performant. Add AngularJS to the mix and you get a pretty powerful mobile app framework.

The flipside with regard to Ionic is that there are (as of yet) fewer full-blown UI widgets like Ionic provides [though there are some nice ones like LightBox in the Famo.us core], so though you aren't boxed in, you also don't get quite the same "one directive and done" simplicity that you get when you're working with-the-grain with Ionic.

Re: Build hybrid apps with the Ionic Creator

#27
post #22

Surely this approach has gotta get some serious uptake soon/finally? For your average CRUD app, coding in iOS and Android (and web) makes little sense. Titanium was promising before it made the big shift to Alloy. Jquery Mobile is oddly "meh". Ionic looks quite nice so far. I see 37 Signals is making this approach work, too (albeit with different tools): http://signalvnoise.com/posts/3766-hybrid-how-we-took-baseca...

How does Alloy make Titanium less promising? From my experience, it's been a strong step forward in productivity and code management.

Re: Build hybrid apps with the Ionic Creator

#29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I've been using Ionic for about a month now. For the most part, it's a great tool to get something off the ground. I'm not positive if it'll hold up to our expectations of a native app yet, but I'm optimistic. I have had a few issues as well though. Most of it has to do with understanding the intended app structure. The documentation is getting better though. For example, getting ion-side-menu to work was difficult f…

I've also been using Ionic for a little over a month. So far, it's been an excellent framework for quickly getting up and running. I really haven't had many hiccups and in the rare case I do, the documentation is very helpful (and well designed).

In regards to the CSS, I find myself customizing more and more of it as time goes on. I think that's to be expected. The important thing is Ionic provides a solid foundation to build on. I'm thus able to focus on the design right away instead of getting stuck in the weeds.

Re: Build hybrid apps with the Ionic Creator

#30

If only it were actually this easy to set up ( http://ionicframework.com/getting-started/ ) - just spent 45 mins trying to get it working with an android target on an ubuntu box and I've had enough, uninstalling everything

This is why I have up trying to write BB apps. It was just so hard to get going.
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