I tried Ionic on Friday last week. The example code didn't work 'out of the box', and there isn't any documentation explaining how to use it. I tried with PhoneGap, with Cordova and running it in a browser both with and without Ripple. I got pretty much nowhere. Contrast that to trying jQM 1.4 RC1 and having a working example running on my phone in about half an hour with Phonegap.
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".
Trust me, we know we need to work on docs and tutorials, and we are. Also note that we weren't actually ready to go live last Friday, so there's that, too (someone else submitted our test site).
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.
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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.
Comments
I tried Ionic on Friday last week. The example code didn't work 'out of the box', and there isn't any documentation explaining how to use it. I tried with PhoneGap, with Cordova and running it in a browser both with and without Ripple. I got pretty much nowhere. Contrast that to trying jQM 1.4 RC1 and having a working example running on my phone in about half an hour with Phonegap.
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".
Trust me, we know we need to work on docs and tutorials, and we are. Also note that we weren't actually ready to go live last Friday, so there's that, too (someone else submitted our test site).
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/
I also had a look.
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.