

Show HN: Bootstrap for Native iOS Apps - pcolton
http://www.pixate.com/bootstrap/index.html

======
bsaul
How far are you planning to go in your support for css properties ? css
animations/transitions ? Positionning (top, left, right) ? There are a lot of
similarities, but by going very far you may end up rewriting a lot of the
storyboard xml in a css format... Then maybe later on, you'll want a WYSIWYG
css editor on top of it, and i'm a bit wondering whether you won't have ended
up rewriting absolutely everything.

From my personal opinion, CSS is nice the first 10 minutes, or whenever you
only have a few element to style, but styling a complete app along with
animations between states makes you really want to stay away from it as far as
possible for mobile apps (and especially ios where resolutions are quite
standard)...

~~~
bennyg
I'm with you about CSS. It seems the target market of this app is geared
towards Web->iOS devs, but that seems like a smaller slice than something like
"Bootstrap for iOS" should be made to do. Bootstrap is great because it makes
web development so much easier through native uses. It doesn't add another
language paradigm to make web development easier - it does it inherently.

1) If you're gonna' call it "Bootstrap for iOS", have the analogy end there.
The site is way, way, way too much like Bootstrap already. Brand it better.

2) Good native code should be inherent! Nobody should have to learn CSS to
make better iOS apps! A beginner should have a framework for her/him that
allows something easy like [view fadeIn] and it work. Then, if they want a
little more control something like [view fadeInOverTime:seconds]. Adding a
shadow should be as easy as [view addShadow] or [view
addShadowWithCornerRadius:radius]. Rounding corners is already extremely easy
using QuartzCore, but let's make it even more intuitive for people. [view
roundCorners] and then [view roundCornersWithRadius:radius]. The whole point
is to make development exponentially easier for anybody to come in and start
making useful, beautiful things.

I'm working on a class to include that does all of point #2 plus a ton more -
and seeing this post will probably be the catalyst to releasing it this
weekend. I have a huge plan in the works for making extremely easy to use UI
elements as well, but I think open sourcing this in chunks, then releasing the
whole thing as an example on how they all work together is gonna' be the route
I go. So far, I've released one part of the project that makes choosing good
colors to use in the app a breeze (<https://github.com/bennyguitar/Colours-
for-iOS>). The next one will be for UI utilities like the fade in and shadow
code mentioned above.

~~~
nmcfarl
Coming to Cocoa dev from the web all of the direct manipulation in objective C
of styling seems like mayhem. I’m not very far in, but already the giant
amount of searching and replacing required to change all the corner radii in
an app is crazy.

For me it seems obvious that this stuff should be /declared/ in one place,
with all other styling mechanism, not littered through dozens of classes that
are primarily interested in getting things done, not looking pretty.

Of course I’m a new at this - and everyone seems to think the other way is
better… So maybe I’ll come around with time, but right now Pixate seems like a
great idea.

~~~
bsaul
Beginner often tend to underuse storyboards. Except for fadein/fadeout and
views being moved you really never end up coding styles in Obj-c. It's all
done graphically using xcode and interface builder. Rounding corners is very
often not necessary at all, since you end up using images all the time for
buttons and backgrounds.

~~~
ofacup
ever worked with git and storyboards? quite the disaster once you're more than
the sole developer

~~~
bennyg
Exactly. Plus storyboards tend to lock you in, and moving around and
constantly iterating to better and better nav schemes kind of goes out the
window.

------
ultimoo
This is a great product.

First there was the native client era on desktops that involved twiddling
around with swt, gtk, qt and windows programming.

Then came the advent of webapps with more uniform abstractions of client side
js frameworks and css3 and dozens of toolkits and decorators around these.

Then came the mobile era with a new breed of native v/s web applications.
Nowadays, the general opinion I hear is that no one really likes webapps on
mobiles. But we as a community actively are trying to port over the
abstractions of css/js frameworks to native mobile so that developers can
continue being comfortable while programming devices that function at the whim
of Apple and Google.

I wish there were a timeline of sorts of all the paradigm shifts that
programming user experiences has undergone over the last decade.

~~~
FuzzyDunlop
I think it's a shame that something as as unambiguous and nice to work with
as, say, the Cocoa framework and MVC (using that example because of
familiarity), was available for us web developers without trying to shoehorn
it into javascript and the browser environment.

Having had a taste of native app development, it makes client side web
development comparatively frustrating. We're continuously getting new features
but little in the way of a more satisfying environment that can help bring all
these parts together.

~~~
pjmlp
This is what makes me nowadays prefer work on native every time I am given the
opportunity to do so.

Too many crazy web projects trying to shoehorn the desktop experience into the
browser in a way that has to work the same across multiple browsers and
operating systems, which leads to CSS/HTML/JavaScript hacks everywhere, with
some customers discussing designs down to the pixel level.

------
pifflesnort
Trying to turn native apps into template-styled web apps is just backwards;
you're discarding the fine attention to detail, typography, pixel-positioning,
scaling animations, etc, that can make native apps so great.

~~~
pcolton
This isn't an all-or-none situation. You lose none of the fidelity of native
development, it's just an abstraction of code to markup. It's all natively
executed using native APIs. Typography, absolute pixel postions, animation,
and much more is all there.

------
tsunamifury
Quite a few things confuse me here:

How is a system based on CSS stylesheet native?

Why is it 1500 dollars per day to do what seems to be templated app
development -- many other companies offer this at far far lower rates (think
50 dollars or less for a complete app).

Why only iOS? The purpose of templated distribution is to reach a wider
audience, not a narrower one.

~~~
pcolton
Pixate Engine is a native framework for iOS (and Android soon) for styling
your native controls using the CSS syntax. There's no web here other than the
shared syntax of CSS. For example, to style a native UIButton:

button { border-radius: 5px; background-color: red; }

Think of it as declarative markup for styling native controls.

------
leviathan
Is it just me or is it a bit ironic that an iOS related website doesn't work
well on iPhone? All the screenshots o out of the screen, and you can't zoom
out or pan to see them.

~~~
pcolton
Fixed. ;-)

------
firlefans
Any performance benchmarks of Pixate vs procedural code or vs similar DSLs,
e.g. Teacup, Formation in Rubymotion?

------
mcintyre1994
I'm not a developer (or user) on iOS, but does it not have a similar design
scheme for apps to Android (since ICS at least)? Would an app that looks like
bootstrap fit in at all, and indeed would Apple even allow an app that
resembles Bootstrap instead of its own design guidelines?

~~~
pcolton
Bootstrap is totally configurable, we're just showing the default styling. In
terms of Apple allowing alternate designs, I think they encourage it, just
look at Garage Band ;-).

~~~
mcintyre1994
Of course, but if there was a standardised sort of style used by most
applications, then recreating it using Bootstrap would seem like a lot of
effort for little benefit. If there isn't much of a standard style, then this
is really neat - that just seemed like an odd situation to me. My impression
was that there would be a style, and Apple would enforce it, but it's great if
that's not true. And fair enough, googling for Garage Band iPad..it looks
unique.

------
bennyg
I still think CSS is one step away from making something awesome for
developers of all flavors (from not developing at all to extremely competent
in other languages) to make native apps even easier to code. I'm working on a
more natural language version for iOS right now.

------
mkhalil
[Stripped-Down Non-Free Version of] Bootsrap for Native iOS Apps.

~~~
pcolton
It's free and open, and will work with our free engine. In its current beta
form, we wanted our commercial customers to have a crack at it first.

~~~
joeblau
I think the "Buy Pixate" is what he's referring to.

~~~
pcolton
Clarified on the site, thanks.

