May 2015 Summaries

Keychain Logistics is an app designed to help independent truck drivers book loads via their phones, featuring real-time capabilities for searching, booking, and communicating with shippers, as well as GPS tracking for shipments. The app utilizes the PubNub service for its real-time system and leverages push notifications to send personalized load availability to drivers. Developed by Mehul Patel and his team using the Ionic framework, which is built on Angular, the app benefits from a hybrid approach to efficiently create both iOS and Android versions, saving time and resources. The team has extensively utilized and customized Ionic's UI elements to enhance the app's functionality and appearance, reflecting Patel's appreciation for Ionic's Angular-based structure and ease of use.

Ionic 1.0, dubbed "uranium-unicorn," marks a significant milestone for the Ionic Framework, transitioning from its beta phase to a stable release after extensive community collaboration and development. This release, while not introducing major overhauls, focuses on stability and performance improvements, such as native scrolling support and enhanced swipe-to-go-back transitions, alongside better platform-specific styles and Windows Phone compatibility. The announcement highlights the success of Ionic apps, with several being featured in app stores, and emphasizes the framework’s growing popularity as an open-source project on GitHub. Looking forward, the Ionic team plans to enhance its services with tools like push notifications, app analytics, and deployment capabilities, while also collaborating closely with Microsoft to expand Windows support. Additionally, the team is actively working on Ionic 2.0 in conjunction with Angular 2.0, aiming to further elevate the framework’s capabilities and maintain its position as a leading tool in hybrid mobile app development.

Ionic, a mobile application framework, initially relied on JavaScript scrolling to implement features like pull to refresh, list reordering, and infinite scrolling due to limitations in early iOS and Android versions that lacked proper native scroll events. While JavaScript scrolling enabled advanced functionalities, it consumed significant processor resources and required modifications to native touch events. As Android evolved to support asynchronous native scroll events with versions 4.1 and later, Ionic adopted native scrolling for smoother performance. However, iOS's WkWebView, introduced in iOS 8, faced issues with the file protocol, necessitating continued use of JavaScript scrolling to ensure accurate inertia effects. Despite these challenges, Ionic's collection-repeat feature still relies on JavaScript scrolling due to its need to manipulate scroll behavior and content dynamically. Developers can enable native scrolling in Ionic by setting the overflow-scroll attribute or configuring it globally, though the team aims to further test its stability before making it the default.

L’autre LaM is a musical audio guide app designed for the Lille Museum of Modern, Contemporary and Outsider Art in France by Ensemble 101, a Paris-based music collective. The app offers four unique museum visits, each featuring a distinct relationship between the museum, music, and user, while also showcasing elements of the permanent collection and over an hour of original music and video. It caters to a diverse audience with a mix of French, English, and various sounds, including a humorous section entirely in English. Developed using the Ionic framework due to its positive reviews and cross-platform capabilities, the app allows for rapid development and online progress sharing with the museum. L’autre LaM is available for download on iOS and Google Play, inviting users to explore and provide feedback.

Ionic has partnered with IBM to integrate Ionic Creator with the IBM MobileFirst Platform, enabling business users without software development skills to quickly prototype hybrid mobile apps suitable for enterprise integration. This collaboration aims to increase mobile app development within the enterprise sector by providing a comprehensive solution that includes analytics, management, and security features. Business analysts and managers in various departments can now generate app ideas and work with developers to build prototypes, which can be deployed using the IBM MobileFirst Platform. The partnership is expected to expand the audience for Ionic, offering more opportunities for experienced Ionic developers and allowing seamless integration of data from enterprise systems. This initiative also opens up new possibilities for collaboration between business teams and developers, broadening the reach of Ionic's tools and community.

The Ionic Playground is a web-based tool introduced by Ben Sperry that simplifies the process of building Ionic apps and demos directly in the browser without requiring any installation. It features an intuitive HTML, CSS, and JavaScript editor with a live preview for immediate updates, allowing users to easily share and customize projects. This platform addresses the complexities of traditional mobile development by eliminating the need for multiple installations and developer accounts, making it particularly useful for educational purposes where students can engage in real-time collaboration and see the results of their work instantly. Beyond education, the Ionic Playground is beneficial for developers to quickly prototype, demonstrate issues, and experiment with new designs. Future enhancements include adding snippets for common Ionic components and integration with the View app, with feedback from users encouraged to further improve the tool.

In collaboration with Microsoft, Ionic has introduced templates for Visual Studio, enhancing the development experience for Windows developers building hybrid mobile apps. These templates, available since May 2015, facilitate the integration of fast UI and AngularJS into Cordova apps, making Visual Studio a preferred environment for Ionic development due to features like automatic dependency installation and efficient debugging with Ripple. The availability of these templates aims to provide first-class support for Cordova and Ionic apps, encouraging developers to utilize the free Community Edition of Visual Studio. Ionic plans to expand the variety of templates and invites feedback from the developer community to improve offerings.