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Ionic Marketplace

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99 pointstilt17 comments

I'm confused. I don't know what ionic is, so I go to ionic.io. I don't see a link for that, so I actually need to change the URL by hand.

Then I notice a light-gray on white "Ionic" link at the bottom. Here it is! but it brings me ionicframework.com which has similar message, but is not the same, as ionic.io.

Maybe a link to the main project and a simple explanation of what it is would have been better than that fancy animated text?

- Ionic Framework (http://ionicframework.com): FOSS for building mobile hybrid apps on top of cordova & angular... Quite popular on Github with ~19k stars: https://github.com/driftyco/ionic

- Ionic Platform (http://ionic.io): Commercial platform from the ionic devs for providing mBaaS, PUSH, Dev Tools, etc for the Ionic community/users

Also different from ionic.com :\

Thanks for the feedback, we will definitely fix this and make it not confusing (totally agree we assume too much background!)

For anyone else who had to dig around to figure out what Ionic was:

> Ionic is a powerful HTML5 SDK that helps you build native-feeling mobile apps using web technologies like HTML, CSS, and Javascript. [0]

[0]: http://ionicframework.com/docs/overview/

Almost looks promising... has anybody used it?

Yes, I used it to create one of my apps. Very satisfied by the feature set provided by them. Very excited about the new changes they will be rolling out from beta soon.

I used it for a fairly complex application for Georgia Tech's classroom manager. It worked really well -- notifications, insane authentication and WebView stuff. On Android, speed was an issue on older versions until I used Crosswalk. However, Crosswalk would crash on older phones :/ Development and debugging Ionic was really easy.

Building right now with it several apps (even with webrtc). If you're a webdev (js/angular, css/sass, etc), it's a god-sent solution... The key is adding chromium (crosswalk) in order to get a consistent experience across android devices. iOS does ok...

https://crosswalk-project.org/

Are you using Crosswalk for both iOS and Android, or just for Android? We've been using Ionic + Cordova with pretty good results on iOS so far, but we're starting to shift focus onto the Android offering.

Only for Android. iOS' webview is powerful enough for our use cases, and if you need webrtc there are a couple of good cordova plugins.

I've been using it for the past couple months and it is hands-down the best option for hybrid mobile development

Yep. I've built several things in it. It's very good.

I'm considering Ionic for a simple web-based music recommendation app that I'm doing as a side project.

For now I am using vanilla Cordova and it has been working fine... Except for iOS notifications, which are a bit of a nightmare to set up. H

as anyone had good success doing push notifications via Ionic? I fear that by choosing it I would still have to go through the same complicated process for getting the APNS certificates to work properly, in which case I don't really see the benefit

We're in the middle of a new project that makes heavy use of PUSH notifications. We've looked into all the possibilities and have concluded that our best option is GCM [0] (which recently added iOS support), plus a custom manager with node-gcm [1].

That works best for us (pricing, etc), but Ionic also has an extremely easy to setup push service [2], that'll be free during alpha. Another option is pushwoosh or building your backend with Parse (also does push)...

Hope it helps

[0] https://developers.google.com/cloud-messaging/gcm

[1] https://github.com/ToothlessGear/node-gcm

[2] https://apps.ionic.io/landing/push

http://ngcordova.com/docs/plugins/pushNotifications/

I didn't have any issues using the above.

You still need some sort of server (i've used rails, ex: https://github.com/rpush/rpush) to send the push notifications (and setup the apns certs), but the above will capture them on your ionic app itself.

What trouble are you running into with APN? I just went through that exercise with a cordova app a few weeks ago, and might be able to help if you need it. My email is in my profile.

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