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
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 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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] Brajeshwar|11 years ago|reply
"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."
[+] [-] taternuts|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] megablast|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pbreit|11 years ago|reply
I see 37 Signals is making this approach work, too (albeit with different tools): http://signalvnoise.com/posts/3766-hybrid-how-we-took-baseca...
[+] [-] tootie|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tzm|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] perryg|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrisdevereux|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JonnieCache|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] krat0sprakhar|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] weavie|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bildung|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] krat0sprakhar|11 years ago|reply
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-...
[+] [-] yesimahuman|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] goatforce5|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] abluecloud|11 years ago|reply
Annoying.
[+] [-] tylermac1|11 years ago|reply