
OnSen UI – Develop HTML5 hybrid and mobile web apps - based2
https://onsen.io/
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LeoNatan25
What's so "most beautiful" about HTML+CSS masquerading (badly) as UIKit?

I know, I know, every web framework is "best", "most" and "beautiful". But
still, for once I would like to know what is so "beautiful" about web
emulating native in a bad manner.

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dvh
The killer feature of web is that there are at least 5 implementations from
major vendors (Mozilla, Google, apple, Microsoft, Opera). Nothing else come
close. I've been burned too many times before by discontinued products to use
anything else for UI.

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neoeldex
Funny thing is there's practically only Mozilla and Google left with their
browsers. Microsoft, Apple and Opera all basically piggyback on the chrome
renderer (prolly not entirely true for safari, but it doesn't run on anything
besides apple anymore)

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stabbles
The animations in the Anim tab of the demo still lag a bit on my Samsung S6.
It's always these subtle, uncanny things that tell you it's not a native app

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TeMPOraL
These, and/or lack of _deep_ integration with platform's UI features (e.g.
keyboard shortcuts), and/or UI occasionally blanking out with 404 or 500 page
because of networking problems.

Yes, you can usually tell webapps from native apps apart pretty quickly.

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pjmlp
While I agree with you, it is also a consequence of not doing proper testing.

I have used a couple of native apps that crash on network problems, and in
some cases they just vanish from the screen on crash without any OS dialog
coming up.

I rather have to deal with mobile web apps than web widgets, specially if I
have to code them.

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perenzo
Alternatives: [https://framework7.io/](https://framework7.io/) and
[https://ionicframework.com/](https://ionicframework.com/)

Did anybody evaluate all of them? On iOS I experienced that most approaches
have issues keeping the header in place when the keyboard shows up.

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cyberferret
I was curious to see if anyone posted how this compared against Ionic (which I
have used since v1 and love).

Appreciate anyone who has used both chiming in with their thoughts in this
thread.

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stephen
I was just looking at this the other day--at first it looked pretty jank on my
desktop chrome, but I switched to an android phone and the animations looked
surprisingly slick. (Haven't tried on an iPhone yet.)

I know the bar for purists is "it will never be native", which is true, but
this is a huge improvement from the state-of-the-art mobile webapp
frameworks/widgets from ~5 years ago.

Definitely great to have options, especially for building/prototyping apps
that otherwise wouldn't exist, e.g. because they'd be (for some/many
developers) prohibitively expensive to MVP.

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buckhx
We leveraged this for an internal product trying to see how far we could push
a PWA with a native feel. Biggest pain was that it doesn't play nice with the
Vue router and history API and really wants to function as a single page app.
Happy to ping one of our product engineers to elaborate if folks are curious
on more specifics.

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gammateam
I really like how far mobile web apps and the ecosystem has come. This is
right in line with my timeline of when it would get good.

Source: Former native mobile app developer that used to defend native mobile
apps.

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spdustin
This is pretty great on iPhone. One suggestion: on the carousel component, it
requires too much of a swipe (50% of device width?) to feel native. Maybe
reduce that to 20%?

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buckhx
The carousel is pretty garbage overall, we dropped it fairly quickly.

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AbuAssar
this directly competes with Ionic 4, which is a nice thing.

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yesimahuman
We're bit fans of Onsen at Ionic, definitely push us to improve

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cyberferret
Hmm... Does this mean we can use Onsen as a 'drop in' replacement for the
front end of an Ionic app? And simply rely on Ionic for the 'back end' routing
etc.? I was just wondering if Onsen is mainly a set of CSS classes which could
replace the Ionic ones for a different look and feel?

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simplecomplex
This looks like a deliberate attempt at cloning iOS’s aesthetic.

The demo does work well!

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fareesh
So this is a competitor to ionic?

Can someone who chose this instead sell me on whether this offers anything
better at the present stage? Curious to know when I should use this instead.

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pjmlp
Actually it looks quite good on my phone, congratulations.

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based2
[https://github.com/OnsenUI/OnsenUI](https://github.com/OnsenUI/OnsenUI)

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splintercell
Obligatory, this uses Idris state machines to build a mobile app using OnSen
UI:

[https://medium.com/the-web-tub/idris-state-machines-in-
javas...](https://medium.com/the-web-tub/idris-state-machines-in-javascript-
apps-b969e2cb6ed2)

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arisAlexis
how does it compare to React Native?

