App.js: Mobile webapps made easy • Hacker News Board

Re: App.js: Mobile webapps made easy

#31

Post by JacksonGariety » Tue, May 27, 2014, 1:30 PM UTC

Isn't this like [ratchet] [1]?

Re: App.js: Mobile webapps made easy

#32

Post by rodion_89 » Tue, May 27, 2014, 2:12 PM UTC

qhoc wrote: post #24

comex wrote: post #15

From some quick testing of the demo on iOS: If you pull a list down from the top or up from the bottom, the wrong thing scrolls. Not sure whether this is possible to work around. iOS 7-style back gesture does not work. In the input demo, pressing return on the Subject field submits the form. Demo bug? Occasional popping when switching screens. Nevertheless, seems pretty solid in general. I like it.

Scrolling is a big issue here. I haven't looked into the source carefully but I saw the same behavior of wrong thing getting scrolled. My experience tells me that it's because they use div's scroll or multiple iframes. HTML in mobile browser is terrible at handling multiple scroller because it doesn't know where people touch or intend to scroll. Only famo.us seems to fix this problem by re-writing the whole scrolling…

It's actually just using the browsers scrolling mechanism. Android 4+, iOS 5+ ship with touch-scrolling that you can enable on an element so it's as close to native scrolling as you can get.

Just add this CSS:

    overflow: scroll;
    -webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch;

Re: App.js: Mobile webapps made easy

#33

Post by rodion_89 » Tue, May 27, 2014, 4:11 PM UTC

comex wrote: post #15

From some quick testing of the demo on iOS: If you pull a list down from the top or up from the bottom, the wrong thing scrolls. Not sure whether this is possible to work around. iOS 7-style back gesture does not work. In the input demo, pressing return on the Subject field submits the form. Demo bug? Occasional popping when switching screens. Nevertheless, seems pretty solid in general. I like it.

Thanks for the feedback!

* Fixed the scrolling issue. Ios safari doesn't let you disable the bounce so there is a workaround now.

* Ios back gesture works fine... Except in mobile safari, again because there is no way to disable apples back gesture. This would work best in phonegap or Kik where you can control these kinds of things

* Will fix subject bug in demo soon..

Re: App.js: Mobile webapps made easy

#34

Post by rodion_89 » Tue, May 27, 2014, 4:13 PM UTC

oahziur wrote: post #17

comex wrote: post #15

From some quick testing of the demo on iOS: If you pull a list down from the top or up from the bottom, the wrong thing scrolls. Not sure whether this is possible to work around. iOS 7-style back gesture does not work. In the input demo, pressing return on the Subject field submits the form. Demo bug? Occasional popping when switching screens. Nevertheless, seems pretty solid in general. I like it.

It seems this is really good for single page (WebView) embedded in a native app. I am curious whether the wrong scrolls will happen if turn off the scroll functionality of the WebView on iOS or Android.

It'll continue I work in webview with panning (bounce) turned off. In fact that's usually the most optimal experience

Re: App.js: Mobile webapps made easy

#35

Post by rodion_89 » Tue, May 27, 2014, 4:33 PM UTC

evv wrote: post #9

I would be a bigger fan if there were some included phonegap utilities & tutorials. Famo.us is making the same mistake for some reason. Aggressively targeting mobile, with half of the toolchain missing to actually shipping mobile apps. Not that I can blame the OP, who is likely not a SF startup with millions in funding.

Like the others said, this is written by Kik Interactive (http://kik.com/) which is well-funded.

The idea is that Kik's browser has the PhoneGap-like utilities that you described built-in, while this is a library for building the UI of an application. http://dev.kik.com/

Re: App.js: Mobile webapps made easy

#36

Post by qhoc » Tue, May 27, 2014, 5:27 PM UTC

rodion_89 wrote: post #32

qhoc wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scrolling is a big issue here. I haven't looked into the source carefully but I saw the same behavior of wrong thing getting scrolled. My experience tells me that it's because they use div's scroll or multiple iframes. HTML in mobile browser is terrible at handling multiple scroller because it doesn't know where people touch or intend to scroll. Only famo.us seems to fix this problem by re-writing the whole scrolling…

It's actually just using the browsers scrolling mechanism. Android 4+, iOS 5+ ship with touch-scrolling that you can enable on an element so it's as close to native scrolling as you can get. Just add this CSS: overflow: scroll; -webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch;

Right. I have tried that with jQuery Mobile and the behavior was similar to what I saw in this framework. Basically for mobile, it's nearly impossible to have main page scrolling and swipe right to pop out the left menu which also has its own scrolling.

Re: App.js: Mobile webapps made easy

#37

Post by aceperry » Tue, May 27, 2014, 9:30 PM UTC

I am just amazed at all of the new cross platform toolkits and frameworks popping up nowadays. Seems to rival the number of new javascript libraries. The attempt to bring cross platform development to mobile is reaching a fever pitch. So many approaches, but there are still compromises or shortcomings from them all. One thing that I've noticed is that most of the newer frameworks are based on web tech and stacks. Which I guess is a good thing, or maybe not.

Re: App.js: Mobile webapps made easy

#38

Post by collyw » Wed, May 28, 2014, 1:11 PM UTC

passfree wrote: post #27

My personal take is that you should always develop for the platform you are targeting. It is not so much about weather the UI is drawn so that it looks native and it is not about performance (although important). It is more about what you can and cannot do natively. For example, in iOS/Mac certain things are not easy to do because the UI components that you are extending are not designed to work in they way you want…

I think most people want to target all platforms, or as many as possible.

Re: App.js: Mobile webapps made easy

#39

Post by collyw » Wed, May 28, 2014, 1:20 PM UTC

finalight wrote: post #12

d4m0 wrote: post #10

Offers similar functionality to http://chocolatechip-ui.com/

i'm taking note of this website right now it seems that there's really a lot of javascript framework/ui for mobile and i'm interested to find which one offers the best performance/ui ratio

I am trying to learn Javascript, coming from a Perl / Python / RDBMS background.

What a mess the JS landscape is. There are so many frameworks, and no clear reason to choose one over the other. Angular has a reputation as being one of the better ones, but it seems overly complex, the documentation is terrible, and the learning curve is steep. And its still one of the better of the ones that I have tried.