7 ms·

Build hybrid apps with the Ionic Creator

126 points by mkremer90 12y ago

abluecloud 12y ago
> Sign up below for early access to the Creator beta. Annoying.
- tylermac1 12y ago
  Yes, annoying that Ionic wants to beta test their new software package. How annoying of them.
  - abluecloud 12y ago
    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.
    - yesimahuman 12y ago
      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.
chrisdevereux 12y ago
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?
- JonnieCache 12y ago
  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.
  - yesimahuman 12y ago
    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?
    - JonnieCache 12y ago
      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...
  - tootie 12y ago
    If you want flexible, you can just use vanilla Cordova. There's always a trade-off between features and flexibility.
    - JonnieCache 12y ago
      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.
    - infomofo 12y ago
      i'm personally a fan of the chrome mobile app framework https://github.com/MobileChromeApps/mobile-chrome-apps 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.
  - beermann 12y ago
- weavie 12y ago
  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.
- krat0sprakhar 12y ago
  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.
bildung 12y ago
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?
- krat0sprakhar 12y ago
  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-mobile-framework-raise-1-million/ http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/10/drifty-makers-of-the-ionic-...
  - bildung 12y ago
    thank you!
- yesimahuman 12y ago
  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.
  - bildung 12y ago
    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!
Brajeshwar 12y ago
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."
pbreit 12y ago
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-basecamp-multi-platform-with-a-tiny-team http://signalvnoise.com/posts/3766-hybrid-how-we-took-baseca...
- tzm 12y ago
  How does Alloy make Titanium less promising? From my experience, it's been a strong step forward in productivity and code management.
- tootie 12y ago
  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.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- perryg 12y ago
  Back now
taternuts 12y ago
If only it were actually this easy to set up (http://ionicframework.com/getting-started/ 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
- megablast 12y ago
  This is why I have up trying to write BB apps. It was just so hard to get going.

126 points by mkremer90 12y ago

abluecloud 12y ago

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

tylermac1 12y ago
Yes, annoying that Ionic wants to beta test their new software package. How annoying of them.
- abluecloud 12y ago
  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.
  - yesimahuman 12y ago
    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.

chrisdevereux 12y ago

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?

JonnieCache 12y ago
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.
- yesimahuman 12y ago
  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?
  - JonnieCache 12y ago
    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...
- tootie 12y ago
  If you want flexible, you can just use vanilla Cordova. There's always a trade-off between features and flexibility.
  - JonnieCache 12y ago
    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.
  - infomofo 12y ago
    i'm personally a fan of the chrome mobile app framework https://github.com/MobileChromeApps/mobile-chrome-apps 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.
- beermann 12y ago
weavie 12y ago
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.
krat0sprakhar 12y ago
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.

bildung 12y ago

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?

krat0sprakhar 12y ago
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-mobile-framework-raise-1-million/ http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/10/drifty-makers-of-the-ionic-...
- bildung 12y ago
  thank you!
yesimahuman 12y ago
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.
- bildung 12y ago
  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!

Brajeshwar 12y ago

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."

pbreit 12y ago

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-basecamp-multi-platform-with-a-tiny-team http://signalvnoise.com/posts/3766-hybrid-how-we-took-baseca...

tzm 12y ago
How does Alloy make Titanium less promising? From my experience, it's been a strong step forward in productivity and code management.
tootie 12y ago
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.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

perryg 12y ago
Back now

taternuts 12y ago

If only it were actually this easy to set up (http://ionicframework.com/getting-started/ 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

megablast 12y ago
This is why I have up trying to write BB apps. It was just so hard to get going.