Open source projects live and die on their community, which springs from examples and documentation that people can learn from. I like the look of Ionic, especially if it was decoupled from Angular, but until it's possible to actually do something with it I (and I imagine many others) can't help out with it.
tl;dr Documentation is critical. Write some, don't just rely on your "doc generator".
The community has actually been more active than we expected, and the forum is seeing a lot of activity in the last week: http://forum.ionicframework.com/
The homepage look very nice but I had pretty much the same issues as you. ---
Frankly I built my own UI because I didn't like the opaque layer most mobile web framework are doing (exception being jQtouch but it's pretty old). It's not "that hard".
It's also bound to angular out of the box. While that's great for people using that framework, it's a big learning curve for anyone else.
When it comes to the overwhelming number of mobile js frameworks its hard to get an idea of speed without running each of the demos individually and comparing. Do you have any rough stats compared to Sencha?
Hey, one can dream, can't they?
Converts an HTML5 canvas-based app to use native graphics routines. I haven't used it but been following it for over a year since the approach seems promising.
BTW, a similar thing exists for the ImpactJS game engine (Ejecta), but it only converts to iOS: http://impactjs.com/ejecta
Actually I would love to hear if anyone has experience with either of these.
Is that right? Is web browser used by WebView a different thing that a default Android browser?
I can tell the browser used by Phonegap is not as good as Chrome. It doesn't popup the keyboard on text fields and things like that, which the Galaxy S2 don't do either.
I am hoping the bugs in Coocoon get fixed as that has the potential to be the best option.
My app have perfect smooth transitions in the chrome browser. yet in the phonegap webview animations are slower & I have rendering bugs I never saw in chrome.
Can't find direct sources right now, but it's fixed in android 4.4, you get chrome
http://www.mobilexweb.com/blog/android-4-4-kitkat-browser-ch...
But there is reports that Apple will not let you through
since jQuery mobile animations perform too poorly, oups.
JQM is beautiful if you really know how to use and know what you're doing.
We're deploying on 20 devices with only one code base and it works flawlessly, it's amazing. We only use native to patch holes or do things we can't do easily with html/css/js.
And your single codebase likely has a UI and ux that feels wrong on all platforms.
(I built two of the largest US banks mobile apps using Yui and jqm. )
I also saw people with lot's of issues with long list & jquery mobile while looking but since it's a framework that basically can be use by anyone I guess I should have expected that some people would submit unoptimized apps with jQuery mobile.
its not magic, its not even hard, you just happen to not know about how it works... if you are interested this is easy to fix with google and experimentation. :)
knowing about android sdk versions is something you would also know if you were an android developer. its everywhere from the first time you install an sdk or ndk - i agree that Google suck at developer tools and docs, absolutely 110%, and this is a good example of that - a lot of their tools I consider 'unshippable' they are so bug riddled and unusable - but thats a tangent.
i do wonder though why even use a native app like this? isn't a web app more friendly? you certainly won't get any of the performance benefits of native code without some real heavy lifting on the part of the framework/library/sdk. isn't a landing page asking you to download a native app just annoying? i know its popular but its just a UX fail however I look at it...
This absolutely mystifies me. Especially after coming in from the iOS development stack, the android sdk's, simulator, et al, are shockingly bad. And it's been YEARS now.
But in reality the ones that I have seen suffered from being terribly slow. The last app demo that I saw using phonegap had 3-5 second loading bars come up every time a button was pressed. This was on Android so I am not sure if the platform was to blame or not.
The app is only has good has the html5 app behind it. On android it's tricky, we just did a test run for our mobile app & we have weird issues with a lot is samsung phones while other phones perform perfectly.
We also decided to remove animations on android for all phones below android 4.2 because the browser was to slow to handle them perfectly.
The app wasnt one I was involved in so I didnt have chance to mess around with it.
Phonegap build is nice if you don't use any prosperity /closed source plugins.
Actually, its free for anything that can be hosted publicly and open-source on a Git repository