Build hybrid apps with the Ionic Creator | Hacker News Reader

Build hybrid apps with the Ionic Creator

ionicframework.com

126 pointsmkremer9031 comments

From the Site.

"Totally free!

We want to help more web and mobile developers become hybrid developers with Ionic. Having great tools like Creator will lower the bar for getting started with mobile development in general, and we love that!

To achieve this dream, we have decided to make the Ionic Creator 100% free. While we might charge in the future for heavy usage, we will always have a free version of Creator available, so you can quickly build Ionic and Cordova apps."

If only it were actually this easy to set up (http://ionicframework.com/getting-started/) - just spent 45 mins trying to get it working with an android target on an ubuntu box and I've had enough, uninstalling everything

This is why I have up trying to write BB apps. It was just so hard to get going.

Surely this approach has gotta get some serious uptake soon/finally? For your average CRUD app, coding in iOS and Android (and web) makes little sense. Titanium was promising before it made the big shift to Alloy. Jquery Mobile is oddly "meh". Ionic looks quite nice so far.

I see 37 Signals is making this approach work, too (albeit with different tools): http://signalvnoise.com/posts/3766-hybrid-how-we-took-baseca...

How does Alloy make Titanium less promising? From my experience, it's been a strong step forward in productivity and code management.

I don't think jquery mobile was ever a good idea for making hybrid apps. Aside from the name, it wasn't nearly as flexible as original jquery. There's also a distinction between what's needed for a mobile site vs a hyrbid app. If the .js files are baked into the app, bandwidth and latency are non-issues. What you need is to optimize performance only.

I'm not familiar with Ionic. It describes itself as a framework for Hybrid apps, which sounds interesting, but all I can see described on the website is html and css. Anyone mind enlightening me on what that means here?

It's angular, with cordova/phonegap packaged alongside it, and then a whole load of ionic sauce in the form of css and angular directives to make the thing work on mobiles in a polished way. They're doing stuff like catching every touch event and doing debouncing, while actually improving performance. Some of it is quite impressive.

I'd recommend it if you need to make an angular app look and behave like a native app as much as possible.

Unfortunately if you want to deviate from ionic's currently small pool of iOS-ish design metaphors, then it's not flexible at all, that's what you sacrifice for having everything else work with minimum fuss. I believe they are working on remedying this, there's lots of stuff on the issue tracker about enabling iOS Mail style layouts and so on.

In the end, it's just angular, and ui-router: this is its strength. Take a look at the repo.

Hey, sorry the theming is giving you trouble :( This week we've been doing a refresh of several components, and I'd love to see if we could get something like this in there, too. Want to email me (in profile) and point me to the biggest frustration with that?

email sent. looking forward to a reply telling me the obvious solution to my problem which I overlooked at the time :)

EDIT: apparently a new version allowing more complex, composed UIs is on the way.

I should add that we have used it successfully to make iOS-looking apps at work, the problems I had were largely due to my need to do weird, not-very-native-looking stuff on a personal project.

Also I'd like to give ionic props for not reimplementing their own lame package management ecosystem, unlike some other client side frameworks I could mention...

If you want flexible, you can just use vanilla Cordova. There's always a trade-off between features and flexibility.

That's exactly what I did in the end. I was hoping to use some of ionic's general optimisations without using its UI components, but I wasn't clever enough to work out if this was a good idea in the short time I had.

i'm personally a fan of the chrome mobile app framework https://github.com/MobileChromeApps/mobile-chrome-apps. It's on top of cordova as well and provides some additional functionality from the chrome extension framework, like oauth support and some additional security features.

I've been using Ionic for about a month now. For the most part, it's a great tool to get something off the ground. I'm not positive if it'll hold up to our expectations of a native app yet, but I'm optimistic. I have had a few issues as well though. Most of it has to do with understanding the intended app structure. The documentation is getting better though.

For example, getting ion-side-menu to work was difficult for some reason. Looking at the documentation now, it shows that the directive is a child of ion-side-menus and a sibling of ion-side-menu-content. I'm not sure if that was always there, but I didn't notice it until now. The framework has been going through some change as well, so some of the examples out there are already outdated.

Regardless, I think Max and the guys at Drifty are doing great. And it's exciting to see a Madison getting mentioned in the development community. Nice work guys.

Edit: Ionic, not Angular

I've also been using Ionic for a little over a month. So far, it's been an excellent framework for quickly getting up and running. I really haven't had many hiccups and in the rare case I do, the documentation is very helpful (and well designed).

In regards to the CSS, I find myself customizing more and more of it as time goes on. I think that's to be expected. The important thing is Ionic provides a solid foundation to build on. I'm thus able to focus on the design right away instead of getting stuck in the weeds.

If you're looking for flexibility in a Angular-driven framework for building mobile apps, you may want to check out Famo.us/Angular (github.com/Famous/famous-angular). The framework is still relatively young, but at 0.1.0 and nearly 5 months of development, it's gaining some traction. (disclosure: I'm a contributor)

The cool thing about Famo.us is that you can express animations imperatively, and the framework enables those animations to be GPU accelerated (i.e. "buttery smooth".) So imagine if jQuery animations were performant. Add AngularJS to the mix and you get a pretty powerful mobile app framework.

The flipside with regard to Ionic is that there are (as of yet) fewer full-blown UI widgets like Ionic provides [though there are some nice ones like LightBox in the Famo.us core], so though you aren't boxed in, you also don't get quite the same "one directive and done" simplicity that you get when you're working with-the-grain with Ionic.

I've just recently been playing with it. It is basically a set of Angular JS directives and CSS that builds on top of PhoneGap / Cordova to make native looking apps.

Ionic is a framework that allows you to create mobile apps using Cordova. You write html/css/js and then use Cordova to generate platform specific code. This is what wiki has to say on "Hybrid" apps -

The resulting applications are hybrid, meaning that they are neither truly native (because all layout rendering is done via web views instead of the platform's native UI framework) nor purely web-based (because they are not just web apps, but are packaged as apps for distribution and have access to native device APIs).

The awesome thing about Ionic is that you have suite of cool widgets and components that are commonplace in mobile like the a header, sidemenu etc. (most of these are created using AngularJS directives). So instead of hand crafting the code for these UI elements, Ionic gives you a nice starting point to build such kinds of apps quickly and easily.

Ionic's toolchain is also delightful to use and much less intimidating than Cordova (or Phonegap) IMHO. If you're looking at building a mobile app which does not require esoteric native APIs and want it to deploy on multiple platforms - give Ionic a shot.

I cant't find either pricing or other hints of a valid business model anywhere. That makes me a bit wary to try it out - how long can ionic exist without income?

Drifty (creators of Ionic) recently raised a million dollars in funding.

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.

Source: http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/10/drifty-makers-of-the-ionic-...

thank you!

Hey, one of the founders here. :) Rest assured our company is financially strong and Ionic will only be getting more love going forwards. We did raise some money recently , but we actually have some nice revenue already (imagine that!).

Unlike our past products, we aren't trying to build a company around just Creator. It's a tool to help existing Ionic devs and train the future of Ionic devs, and so we want to keep it free as much as possible to just help more people build with Ionic.

We did raise some money recently , but we actually have some nice revenue already (imagine that!).

Thanks for that info. Using a new framework for a project always involves some leap of faith for me. Perhaps I'm a bit too conservative there, but I hate sinking hours into learning something new, only to find out that it's soon going to get abandoned by its creators. So real revenue is great to hear, ionic looks really nice so far :)

Good luck for your endeavor!

That's awesome. I'm such a hater of the iOS dev requirements so I really hope that the hybrid app space really takes off. Do you have any plans for mitigating JavaScript performance on mobile devices? Do you see any movement in building cross-paltform plugins?

JavaScript is fairly fast, the DOM is what is slow in my experience. I too am hopeful that the hybrid app space takes off as well.

It would be really cool to see Ionic have some support for windows. Then I could really see this being adopted at my company.

They've previously built https://codiqa.com/ and https://jetstrap.com/

I'm guessing their experience with drag'n'drop builders for jQuery Mobile and Bootstrap led them to believe they could build a better back-end framework for them to provide a service on top of. And/or they wanted to control a larger part of the ecosystem. Whatever... It's all good.

Ionic is really nice. I've been building an app with it where I use Ionic to handle most of the visual presentation, with a bit of native Objective C to handle the bits where I felt HTML/CSS/JS wasn't quite up to the task. Even when abusing it in a way that wasn't intended i'm finding it a pleasure to work with. Recommended.

> Sign up below for early access to the Creator beta.

Annoying.

Yes, annoying that Ionic wants to beta test their new software package. How annoying of them.

Yes, but it's not an instant access beta program. So whilst I appreciate they want to beta it, I'd like to have a little play knowing that it's in beta.

Sorry for the confusion. It's not in beta yet. No one is using it and it's not quite ready. The list is for when that opens up, and we will be liberal about letting people in.

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