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How we built our app in 2 weeks using Ionic Framework

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Re: How we built our app in 2 weeks using Ionic Framework

#51

Post by no_future »

thomasfl wrote: post #43

Mobile app is most most certainly going to be made using html and javascript in the time to come. Ionic and angular is great for building mobile apps with standard mobile UI elements like headers with back buttons and chevrons, pages that slides in from the side, modals and tab bars at the bottom of the screen. Everything is meticulously created in html, css and javascript. Scrolling is good enough for most usecases,…

What a dreadful notion, I hope this never happens. Development on mobile devices is a great way to develop on a web connected platform that reaches lots of consumers, but instead of using horrible, ancient tools that are expected to do things today that they were never designed to do at the time of their inception(HTML/CSS/Javascript), you can use capable systems languages like C(and now Swift, which I have no experience with but have heard generally good things about) and Java.

That I call traditional frontend web tech ancient and out of place today isn't even really an opinion - the deluge of Javascript/CSS frameworks, compile-to languages,and lists of best practices would suggest that something is wrong there. Web stuff is just way easier to get into so there are a huge amount of developers available, especially the types who spend more time yapping on their blogs about the latest overhyped software trend than actually writing software.

I don't know about animations and whatnot, but for games and image processing i.e. 2 enormous chunks of all mobile software, Javascript isn't replacing anything anytime soon.

I don't understand why someone would want to spend hours trying to optimize languages which weren't designed to run native software on a platform to be as effective as the ones that were when you could just write the software in the native language, to me this just seems like an exercise in futility. Even moreso considering the fact that Javascript and HTML are horribly unproductive languages, though I suppose since so many people know them well they can be more productive in them than in a language they don't know.

Re: How we built our app in 2 weeks using Ionic Framework

#52

Post by rayv »

TeeWEE wrote: post #41

Interesting, But i installed the app on my nexus 5 and used it... It feels like i'm opening the browser. The app doesn't feel native. Input elements are weird. The dialog is weird. The animation is sluggish. And the spinner animation is moving in a weird fashion. For a lot of apps thats allright. But if you want to create a killer app, please go native.

My Nexus 5 is also sluggish in comparison to my iPhone. From the little research I did it has to do with the default webview used on Android. Hopefully this will also get better in future.

Re: How we built our app in 2 weeks using Ionic Framework

#53

Post by girvo »

timruffles wrote: post #15

Nice looking app! You're not doing promises right however :) `$http.get()` etc returns a promise, so you can do all transforms and logic via `.then()`. The only time you should ever use `$q.defer()` is when you're wrapping a non-promise API. The bluebird library has a nice write-up: https://github.com/petkaantonov/bluebird/wiki/Promise-anti-p...

Promises are pretty great, too. I wrote some (now in production!) feature detection/facial recognition code using OpenCV through the node-opencv library, but as some of the big calls were async and I needed it to work in a somewhat synchronous way, I wrapped it all up in Q. Once you understand how they work, they can be quite great.

Re: How we built our app in 2 weeks using Ionic Framework

#54

Post by findjashua »

no_future wrote: post #51
thomasfl wrote: post #43

Mobile app is most most certainly going to be made using html and javascript in the time to come. Ionic and angular is great for building mobile apps with standard mobile UI elements like headers with back buttons and chevrons, pages that slides in from the side, modals and tab bars at the bottom of the screen. Everything is meticulously created in html, css and javascript. Scrolling is good enough for most usecases,…

What a dreadful notion, I hope this never happens. Development on mobile devices is a great way to develop on a web connected platform that reaches lots of consumers, but instead of using horrible, ancient tools that are expected to do things today that they were never designed to do at the time of their inception(HTML/CSS/Javascript), you can use capable systems languages like C(and now Swift, which I have no experi…

This comment would be spot on 2 years ago, but once you try libraries like Ractive or React, it's iOS/Android that begin to feel ancient. How do they not have data binding in 2014?

Also, having to maintain a separate codebase for each platform just seems inefficient. The solution doesn't have to be Javascript (could be C#), though Ractive and React make it surprisingly pleasant to write JS.

Re: How we built our app in 2 weeks using Ionic Framework

#55

Post by scriptproof »

no_future wrote: post #51
thomasfl wrote: post #43

Mobile app is most most certainly going to be made using html and javascript in the time to come. Ionic and angular is great for building mobile apps with standard mobile UI elements like headers with back buttons and chevrons, pages that slides in from the side, modals and tab bars at the bottom of the screen. Everything is meticulously created in html, css and javascript. Scrolling is good enough for most usecases,…

What a dreadful notion, I hope this never happens. Development on mobile devices is a great way to develop on a web connected platform that reaches lots of consumers, but instead of using horrible, ancient tools that are expected to do things today that they were never designed to do at the time of their inception(HTML/CSS/Javascript), you can use capable systems languages like C(and now Swift, which I have no experi…

"instead of using horrible, ancient tools" (JavaScript=1995, HTML 5 spec=2014) "use capable systems languages like C" (Objective-C=1982, C=1972, Java=1994). WTF?

Re: How we built our app in 2 weeks using Ionic Framework

#56

Post by rayv »

venomsnake wrote: post #48

How can ionic be performance obsessed when it is a wrapper of cordova? How can they achieve better perfomance than plain cordova that way?

The improvement doesn't necessarily come from the cordova side of things. That's still all the same old webview that gets wrapped up. The real difference is achieved with everything else that gets used to build the app. The Ionic framework avoids DOM manipulation where possible and enables hardware accelerated animations. Both these things is possible on top of plain cordova, but Ionic makes it so much easier and they have already done the hard work of figuring out what is going to perform best inside that cordova wrapped webview.

Re: How we built our app in 2 weeks using Ionic Framework

#57

Post by imaffett »

rayv wrote: post #52
TeeWEE wrote: post #41

Interesting, But i installed the app on my nexus 5 and used it... It feels like i'm opening the browser. The app doesn't feel native. Input elements are weird. The dialog is weird. The animation is sluggish. And the spinner animation is moving in a weird fashion. For a lot of apps thats allright. But if you want to create a killer app, please go native.

My Nexus 5 is also sluggish in comparison to my iPhone. From the little research I did it has to do with the default webview used on Android. Hopefully this will also get better in future.

I work at Intel and we have the Crosswalk Project - https://crosswalk-project.org/ Even Google mentions using it for Android 4+ devices.

Re: How we built our app in 2 weeks using Ionic Framework

#58

Post by matthewmacleod »

no_future wrote: post #51
thomasfl wrote: post #43

Mobile app is most most certainly going to be made using html and javascript in the time to come. Ionic and angular is great for building mobile apps with standard mobile UI elements like headers with back buttons and chevrons, pages that slides in from the side, modals and tab bars at the bottom of the screen. Everything is meticulously created in html, css and javascript. Scrolling is good enough for most usecases,…

What a dreadful notion, I hope this never happens. Development on mobile devices is a great way to develop on a web connected platform that reaches lots of consumers, but instead of using horrible, ancient tools that are expected to do things today that they were never designed to do at the time of their inception(HTML/CSS/Javascript), you can use capable systems languages like C(and now Swift, which I have no experi…

I don't understand why someone would want to spend hours trying to optimize languages which weren't designed to run native software on a platform to be as effective as the ones that were when you could just write the software in the native language, to me this just seems like an exercise in futility. Even moreso considering the fact that Javascript and HTML are horribly unproductive languages, though I suppose since so many people know them well they can be more productive in them than in a language they don't know.

I don't understand how you can fail to understand this.

People want to write cross-platform apps for mobile devices. The marketplace is pretty evenly split between iOS and Android devices, and anybody releasing an app probably wants to make it available on both platforms. However, the cost of using two entirely separate tooling stacks to do this could easily be far too high for small apps.

Your dislike of HTML/CSS/Javascript is pretty baseless too. Lots of developers like them, are productive in them, and don't feel that they're all that bad. The fact that compile-to-JS/CSS languages exist is meaningless – it's like complaining that assembly is useless because nobody uses it directly.

And bear in mind that JS now approaches ~0.5x native C code performance with Asm.js – this is better than Dalvik[1]. That opens up a lot of options.

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/javascript/2013/08/01/staring-at-th...

Re: How we built our app in 2 weeks using Ionic Framework

#59

Post by rayv »

Kiro wrote: post #19

What does Ionic provide exactly? What is the difference between this and just using AngularJS + Cordova?

Ionic just provides a bunch of really useful components (angular directives) that's already hooked up and ready to use. This not only saves time developing, but testing as well. Also, comparing the Ionic components to jQuery mobile is not really fair. jQuery mobile is quite horrid in my opinion..

Re: How we built our app in 2 weeks using Ionic Framework

#60

Post by andwaal »

findjashua wrote: post #54
no_future wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a dreadful notion, I hope this never happens. Development on mobile devices is a great way to develop on a web connected platform that reaches lots of consumers, but instead of using horrible, ancient tools that are expected to do things today that they were never designed to do at the time of their inception(HTML/CSS/Javascript), you can use capable systems languages like C(and now Swift, which I have no experi…

This comment would be spot on 2 years ago, but once you try libraries like Ractive or React, it's iOS/Android that begin to feel ancient. How do they not have data binding in 2014? Also, having to maintain a separate codebase for each platform just seems inefficient. The solution doesn't have to be Javascript (could be C#), though Ractive and React make it surprisingly pleasant to write JS.

You know that one of the main things that React(w/flux) tries to fix is all the errors made because of data binding..
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