OnSen UI – Develop HTML5 hybrid and mobile web apps | Hacker News Reader

OnSen UI – Develop HTML5 hybrid and mobile web apps

onsen.io

119 pointsbased228 comments

What's so "most beautiful" about HTML+CSS masquerading (badly) as UIKit?

I know, I know, every web framework is "best", "most" and "beautiful". But still, for once I would like to know what is so "beautiful" about web emulating native in a bad manner.

More software development options give you more freedom to choose a path that gives the best solution to the problem you're trying to solve. That is "beautiful" for me. Software development in the real world is a game of trade-offs. You have time-to-market and various other business considerations to take into account. Many times, choosing the "best" technological solution will harm your business. What is best and beautiful depends on the wider context.

The killer feature of web is that there are at least 5 implementations from major vendors (Mozilla, Google, apple, Microsoft, Opera). Nothing else come close. I've been burned too many times before by discontinued products to use anything else for UI.

Funny thing is there's practically only Mozilla and Google left with their browsers. Microsoft, Apple and Opera all basically piggyback on the chrome renderer (prolly not entirely true for safari, but it doesn't run on anything besides apple anymore)

I consider not having to write an app in Swift/Metal/Whatever Apple crap and different app in Java/NDK/whatever Android crap to be pretty "beautiful".

That said, I use Xamarin instead of this.

The animations in the Anim tab of the demo still lag a bit on my Samsung S6. It's always these subtle, uncanny things that tell you it's not a native app

Likewise on my S8, the telltale jankiness gives it away.

Works fine for me on an older iPhone

These, and/or lack of deep integration with platform's UI features (e.g. keyboard shortcuts), and/or UI occasionally blanking out with 404 or 500 page because of networking problems.

Yes, you can usually tell webapps from native apps apart pretty quickly.

While I agree with you, it is also a consequence of not doing proper testing.

I have used a couple of native apps that crash on network problems, and in some cases they just vanish from the screen on crash without any OS dialog coming up.

I rather have to deal with mobile web apps than web widgets, specially if I have to code them.

The app accessing your contact list, monitoring phone calls, accessing your private photos. That's also how you can tell the difference between a "native" app and a progressive web app.

Even on a modern pixel 3, the slider animation is a bit behind. Everything else looks smooth, but the slider definitely feels "off".

Alternatives: https://framework7.io/ and https://ionicframework.com/

Did anybody evaluate all of them? On iOS I experienced that most approaches have issues keeping the header in place when the keyboard shows up.

I was curious to see if anyone posted how this compared against Ionic (which I have used since v1 and love).

Appreciate anyone who has used both chiming in with their thoughts in this thread.

I was just looking at this the other day--at first it looked pretty jank on my desktop chrome, but I switched to an android phone and the animations looked surprisingly slick. (Haven't tried on an iPhone yet.)

I know the bar for purists is "it will never be native", which is true, but this is a huge improvement from the state-of-the-art mobile webapp frameworks/widgets from ~5 years ago.

Definitely great to have options, especially for building/prototyping apps that otherwise wouldn't exist, e.g. because they'd be (for some/many developers) prohibitively expensive to MVP.

We leveraged this for an internal product trying to see how far we could push a PWA with a native feel. Biggest pain was that it doesn't play nice with the Vue router and history API and really wants to function as a single page app. Happy to ping one of our product engineers to elaborate if folks are curious on more specifics.

I really like how far mobile web apps and the ecosystem has come. This is right in line with my timeline of when it would get good.

Source: Former native mobile app developer that used to defend native mobile apps.

This is pretty great on iPhone. One suggestion: on the carousel component, it requires too much of a swipe (50% of device width?) to feel native. Maybe reduce that to 20%?

The carousel is pretty garbage overall, we dropped it fairly quickly.

this directly competes with Ionic 4, which is a nice thing.

We're bit fans of Onsen at Ionic, definitely push us to improve

Hmm... Does this mean we can use Onsen as a 'drop in' replacement for the front end of an Ionic app? And simply rely on Ionic for the 'back end' routing etc.? I was just wondering if Onsen is mainly a set of CSS classes which could replace the Ionic ones for a different look and feel?

This looks like a deliberate attempt at cloning iOS’s aesthetic.

The demo does work well!

So this is a competitor to ionic?

Can someone who chose this instead sell me on whether this offers anything better at the present stage? Curious to know when I should use this instead.

Actually it looks quite good on my phone, congratulations.

https://github.com/OnsenUI/OnsenUI

Obligatory, this uses Idris state machines to build a mobile app using OnSen UI:

https://medium.com/the-web-tub/idris-state-machines-in-javas...

how does it compare to React Native?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com