I’ve been looking for a nice mobile UI framework that plays well together with angular for quite some time now. When I started developing golf-caddie.se jQuery Mobile was pretty much the only competent framework out there and it was quite cumbersome to get it to play nice with angular. So every now and then I try out new UI frameworks, hoping to find a replacement for jqm. By the way, did I mention that I want it to work well on WP8? Yup, proud owner of a lumia 920.
A couple of months ago I gave
ionicframework a go, don’t remember the details but it was awful on WP8. Yesterday I came across an open source project,
mobile-angular-ui, seemed to be exactly what I’ve been looking for.
You may wonder, why not just use bootstrap? Simple answer – because it doesn’t give the same look and feel as a native app, my web app is intended to be used on the golf course and on mobile devices only, plain bootstrap just doesn’t cut it. The user controls isn’t designed with mobile first in mind even if the layouting mechanism is.
Anyways, before I started a massive refactoring to replace jqm I put together a little “hello world”-app with a simple slide in menu and some page navigations. I’ve hosted it on
http://mobile-angular-ui-test.towfeek.se/.
Really simple stuff, a sidebar and two partials. Seemed to work fine until I added an animation when navigating between pages. Boom, page doesn’t render! Ok that’s fine, not a deal breaker, who needs animations anyways? I just
reported a bug and went on with it.
The ultimate test – how does it look on my WP8?
- Page renders a bit slow, I can see the default title before the partial updates it.
- Slide menu actually slides in, sweet!
- Navigation works fine without animations.
- Page only renders the content that fits the screen initially, scrolling doesn’t work. Deal breaker!
The project is still in an early stage, and it definitely gots potential. I’ll try to contribute to the project if time allows but I wont refactor
golf-caddie to use it just yet
.
Cheers!