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Comment by stangeek | Hacker News Reader

I like some of the ideas in the CLI (live reloading on both platforms, live dom editing etc.), but indeed this is very much Ionic + Firebase-like 3 way binding bundled into a nice packaging.

Not sure I see the benefit vs. Ionic in itself to be honest.

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The big unique thing is the native UI and navigation – instead of running a single WebView and doing everything in the DOM, we actually shuffle around multiple WebViews by leveraging the native navigation controllers (and native UI elements like navigation bar).

This means that you can e.g. have your details view running in the device memory even when it's not visible. Then, when you click on a link on your index page, the details view animates into view using a hardware-accelerated, native transition. Same for tabs – switching between them is instant, since no DOM needs to be redrawn. It's a whole separate WebView being brought onto the screen.

Disclaimer: I work for AppGyver.

So you're not using webview for the entire app? Does this mean that one could possibly implement the camera-feature of the facebook chat client? The one where the viewfinder occupies the lower 2/5ths of the screen (where the keyboard would go). I have an app-idea in my head that would benefit from this ;)

If each tab is a different WebView, how is angular working between tabs (I.E. updating something in one tab being reflected in another tab, or similar)?

Is each WebView contain a different bootstrapped angular? are you using some kind of "parent" WebView and communicating between WebViews (I'm not sure how two-way binding will work in this case) ?

check this out: http://docs.appgyver.com/supersonic/guides/architecture/comm... -- basically, there are many options, depending on what you want to do. you can bind angular scope between views, if you're using angular. you can also broadcast messages etc. you can also have a "parent" webview that's hidden, it's pretty straight forward to do.

One of the things I like about Cordova/Ionic is that its just like regular web development. I can for the most part develop with a browser and be assured everything will work the same on the emulator/phone.

Since Supersonic is using multiple WebViews, how would that affect my usual workflow?

it won't affect your workflow much, since everything from communicating between webviews etc. is really straight forward. also, you get immediate updates on your devices, simulators and emulators all the time as making code changes. you can use chrome/safari to debug everything etc.

Ionic has no runtime.. you have to use cordova/phonegap which sucks big time. Supersonic has its own runtimes for iOS and Android that have much more features and are way faster... + they are compatible with Cordova/Phonegap plugins

Thanks for the explanation.

I have developed several more or less complex apps with Ionic and have yet to see a performance issues on "recent" devices (ie. >4S). But still it's an interesting idea.

One comment: if you have used Ionic purely for UI, maybe you can make this part more modular? eg. giving the ability to use Material UI might be interesting...

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