Ionic has released the production ready version 1.0, and has started work on the next version that will be built on AngularJS 2.0. Also, soon a number of mobile services –Push, Deploy, Analytics, Package - will be made public.
Ionic is a UI framework for building hybrid mobile applications with HTML5 technologies. Instead of taking care of building the entire application, Ionic focuses on the user interface and leaves the rest to Cordova. Ionic employs AngularJS for the creation and use of UI components, views, controllers and routing.
Eighteen months from the initial alpha release and after merging 186 pull requests and closing ~3,000 issues, Ionic has reached the stable 1.0 milestone. Beside providing an interface that attempts to resemble the native interface of the main mobile platforms, this version comes with the following features:
- Native scrolling
- Swipe-to-go-back interactive transitions animating the navigation bar title and back button
- SVG icons can be encapsulated within directives to avoid SVG markup
- Large lists scroll smoothly
- Improved Windows Phone support
- Improved keyboard support for modals and orientation change
Going forward, the Ionic team intends to fix issues with Windows Phone related to tap/click/activator behavior, add more Visual Studio templates and better native scrolling. They also have in the works a number of services:
- Push – push notifications
- Deploy – updating apps without re-submitting to the store and rolling back to a previous version if desired
- Analytics – statistics on users’ interaction with applications
- Package – building for iOS without needing a Mac
Ionic View enables developers to share their apps with testers without having to go through an app store. The Playground lets one play with the code in the browser and see how it would look like on a phone. Creator is a drag-and-drop tool for creating hybrid apps with Ionic, being integrated with IBM MobileFirst Platform.
The Ionic team intends to release 2.0 the same time with AngularJS 2.0, work having started to support it.