Drifty, Makers of the Ionic Mobile Framework, Raise $1M | Hacker News Reader

Drifty, Makers of the Ionic Mobile Framework, Raise $1M

techcrunch.com

43 pointssomethingnew23 comments

Direct link to the Ionic Framework: http://ionicframework.com/

They've also got the Ionic framework icons available as a standalone download at http://ionicons.com - I use these frequently.

Awesome news guys, good to see some Midwest companies getting love. Always been a fan of your work and Ionic is a great framework.

That's fantastic news for them, and me by extension. I've been watching their project closely since discovering it and am excited to prototype a hybrid app with it for my new startup soon. If the performance really does meet their claims, I will be one happy AngularJS wielding front end engineer.

Thanks! Let us know if you ever have any questions as you play with it. It's come a long ways since we were last on HN :)

Awesome, definitely using this for my next project. When I was originally looking at this, I thought your Ionic Weather app screenshot was pulling my location. Turns out your guys are in Madison!

I'm always curious what the business model is. I don't see any clear call to action on http://ionicframework.com/

From the article: "With the additional funding, the founders plan to now focus solely on developing Ionic further, with plans to improve gestures and animations, plus roll out mobile services in 2014 that would make using Ionic a viable alternative to native app development. Areas of focus include things like analytics, notifications, and testing service. These would help the company generate revenue from its free platform."

Congrats to drifty/ionic team, what you have achieved so far is great, your angular symbiosis is remarkable. I'm developing my startup mobile app with ionic despite its alpha tag. I have a question, maybe I must ask on your forum but I'm here right now. Do you have plans to implement some UI components truly native? through cordova/phonegap plugins. I think that you are in good position to implement that, even using angular directives as you do now. That will be great.

Fantastic news, we are developing our startup's apps on the Ionic framework and it's been great so far. Every now and then I get around to putting some Ionic specific tips up on Coderwall if anyone is interested.

Here's a horizontal slider directive I implemented the other day. Am very keen to see what new animations come out of Drifty soon :)

https://coderwall.com/p/gzzoxa

Congratulations guys, great to hear Ionic has good momentum.

I tried to use this for a recent project but struggled with performance issues on Android. Not recommended at this time for production.

Could you elaborate? It would seem performance issues would be tied to whatever Angular code is being written. Or are there UI issues?

Initially, we focused on iOS only just to get the alpha out in November. Turns out demand for Android was huge, but we were doing things that worked well on iOS (like box-shadow) and certain animations, but hurt Android performance on sub 4.4 devices.

We've since built a system to gracefully fall back to less intensive operations on older Androids, and we have made a good amount of progress on Android performance over the last month (still more work to do as always).

As many hybrid app developers will tell you, older Androids are like dealing with IE 6 when it comes to web. So we hope our work means a lot less for you.

Define older -- 4.1.x and later represent more than 50% of devices out there:

http://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html

I agree with you on box-shadows -- its a big no-no in the android-land. There are some things however android chrome does better than mobile safari, batching browser repaints for instance. If you focus on CSS-driven animations/interactions for your ui, you should be able to reduce the performance issues on android though.

Thanks, Android performance is something we've been working hard on, and have made a good amount of progress with recently (especially on newer devices). Unfortunately, it's still lagging behind recent iOS devices.

Making Android better is one thing this money will go towards :)

I used it in production for an application that is in the App Store right now(ChefSteps). It was a pleasure. It doesn't quite feel completely native yet, but it's close.

I wonder if there is any plans to fully support Android. By that, I mean, the UI is iOS specific, and doesn't seem to adopt to the way Android does things. Simply porting an iOS app to Android and reusing the same interface is basically saying that Android is a second class citizen.

I can't speak for them, but it seems like their icon set at least supports Android - perhaps the UI is just ultra flat, which you perceive to be an iOS trait?

I think that is not flat because the iOS trait but performance, since gradiants and other anti-flat UI properties are very expensive about it.

We will be improving this quite a bit this year. We've made some small steps, like not bouncing on scroll and letting you left-align titles, but we have more work to do. Thanks!

OMG, this is fabulous.

how does this measure up to Intel XDK?

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