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Comment by JonnieCache | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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 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.

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.

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