Uikit – A lightweight and modular front-end framework | Hacker News Reader

Uikit – A lightweight and modular front-end framework

getuikit.com

Isn't UIKit Apple's framework. Probably time for a new name.

What if he doesn't know about Object C at all? Different domain, I think.

I dunno. A different domain would be like if I called my new bluegrass band, Uikit.

This name does sort of confuse. Although I don't know how more generic you can get then, "User Interface Kit", although the capitalization of Uikit is a little awkward.

Not that generic – Apple uses "kit" as a suffix for most of their frameworks, and I don't know any other large frameworks that do that (could be wrong on this, of course, but it does seem an "Apple thing" at this point).

I can think of 2 much older examples of 'kit', as a part of toolkit, in a UI framework name:

* GTK

* Tk of Perl/Tk

NeXTSTEP (macOS and iOS's predecessor) predates Tk's the use of the term kit by 3 years and GTK's by almost 10.

I'll probably skip on UiKit. In a cursory, five-minute tryout of various components I found three errors (using latest Chrome on OSX, version 54.0.2840.98).

Here's a description of the problems I found: http://imgur.com/a/XSo5T

The point here isn't to nitpick. But I've found three problems after the most basic review. That doesn't give me much confidence in quality of the codebase. If I commit to using this in a large project, spending 40+ hours with UiKit, how many more problems will I find? (And, ultimately have to fix).

For a quick overview of look-and-feel of elements, see https://getuikit.com/docs/customizer.html

It looks broken on mobile

This has been around for a long time. I've used it on projects and been impressed because it's small, naming structure is decent and it contains most things you need.

If I remember correctly it was developed by YooTheme, a company that sells templates for Joomla.

They also had a great plug in that was good for managing user submissions easily with custom fields. I used it at a time where my skills werent as good. The client is still using it AFAIK.

Another UI framework.

So that's...

HTML/CSS/JS:

http://getbootstrap.com

http://bourbon.io

http://foundation.zurb.com

http://semantic-ui.com

https://getmdl.io

https://getuikit.com

http://purecss.io

http://materializecss.com

---------

React:

https://react-bootstrap.github.io

http://www.material-ui.com

---------

Phew. And people complain about JavaScript frameworks. Those are just the ones I've remembered. Probably a hundred more whose names my memory did not retain. Varying use cases for the likes of min.css and Material Design Lite/clones but still.

I also developed my own (it would be unfair to call it a framework in my case) boilerplate for front-end work, but even if I turned it into a UI framework, I wouldn't be able to justify adding to the list above.

I'm in two minds about UI frameworks anyway. I keep mine as a boilerplate because I like to offer significantly different design options when I develop a website for a client, and I think front-end frameworks have played some part in the samey-ness of all websites today.

That said, how many start-ups have launched with less money spent on front-end developers thanks to Bootstrap? Lots, I'm sure.

How many hours were saved not working out all of the IE8 hacks Bootstrap includes as standard? Many, many, many.

Bootstrap and friends can all be chopped down to size before you even download the source files. Others like Bass CSS are designed to be extremely malleable, so I'm not sure what else there is to bring to the table.

Stuff like Bulma is flexbox-based, which is advertised as a feature, though I'm not sure it should be. In my experience, any mention of flexbox means 'less reliable than using float/display: inline-block/position: absolute for older browsers'

Applaud you for what it a lot of work and a nice, clean UI kit. But at the end of the day, what really differentiates this one from, say, Bootstrap or SemanticUI etc.?

Seems to be a rehash of similar components in a lot of other libraries, but with less featured functionality. For instance, I checked out the autocomplete component, but it doesn't seem to do a 'progressive' search when you start typing in something. Instead, as soon as you start typing, it displays ALL the options in the drop down. I would much rather it does a keyword match and narrows down the selection the more you type - like other autocomplete UI kits do.

This is my favorite frontend framework ATM. I have used Zurb's Foundation and Twitter's Bootstrap too for fairly big projects and I found UIkit to be the best of both worlds. The markup required for it to work is much smaller than with Bootstrap, it looks great, the grid system is flexible, it has a ton of official javascript components, so this framework is pretty great. I highly recommend it.

from an SEO perspective they should rename. People searching for help will have to wade through hundreds of UIKit results for iOS

Looks interesting, though it's odd the grid only goes to 10 columns - 12 is much more flexible.

Don't let this fool you, you can still create 2, 3, 4, 5, or even 6 column rows, also with nested grids you can create a 12 column row too.

Cool thanks, that's good to know.

Why does the front page tell me nothing about what it's actually like to use this, i.e. would you at least show me some example code?

It's a very generic "I am yet another framework that can do everything you ever dreamed of doing".

ok, I get it, you have css and you can do components. How does that make you any different from React or Angular or Knockout or any other library/framework?

How about posting link to frameworks only when they release a significant new version?

bootstrap alternative?

More like Zurb Foundation alternative. Check out their twitter https://twitter.com/getuikit to have a first glance at upcoming goodies in version 3.0.

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