
Drifty, Makers of the Ionic Mobile Framework, Raise $1M - somethingnew
http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/10/drifty-makers-of-the-ionic-mobile-framework-raise-1-million/
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hadem
Direct link to the Ionic Framework:
[http://ionicframework.com/](http://ionicframework.com/)

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iLoch
They've also got the Ionic framework icons available as a standalone download
at [http://ionicons.com](http://ionicons.com) \- I use these frequently.

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Killswitch
Awesome news guys, good to see some Midwest companies getting love. Always
been a fan of your work and Ionic is a great framework.

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dchuk
That's fantastic news for them, and me by extension. I've been watching their
project closely since discovering it and am excited to prototype a hybrid app
with it for my new startup soon. If the performance really does meet their
claims, I will be one happy AngularJS wielding front end engineer.

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yesimahuman
Thanks! Let us know if you ever have any questions as you play with it. It's
come a long ways since we were last on HN :)

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milkanic
Awesome, definitely using this for my next project. When I was originally
looking at this, I thought your Ionic Weather app screenshot was pulling my
location. Turns out your guys are in Madison!

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reedlaw
I'm always curious what the business model is. I don't see any clear call to
action on [http://ionicframework.com/](http://ionicframework.com/)

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atjoslin
From the article: "With the additional funding, the founders plan to now focus
solely on developing Ionic further, with plans to improve gestures and
animations, plus roll out mobile services in 2014 that would make using Ionic
a viable alternative to native app development. Areas of focus include things
like analytics, notifications, and testing service. These would help the
company generate revenue from its free platform."

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hcentelles
Congrats to drifty/ionic team, what you have achieved so far is great, your
angular symbiosis is remarkable. I'm developing my startup mobile app with
ionic despite its alpha tag. I have a question, maybe I must ask on your forum
but I'm here right now. Do you have plans to implement some UI components
truly native? through cordova/phonegap plugins. I think that you are in good
position to implement that, even using angular directives as you do now. That
will be great.

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horyd
Fantastic news, we are developing our startup's apps on the Ionic framework
and it's been great so far. Every now and then I get around to putting some
Ionic specific tips up on Coderwall if anyone is interested.

Here's a horizontal slider directive I implemented the other day. Am very keen
to see what new animations come out of Drifty soon :)

[https://coderwall.com/p/gzzoxa](https://coderwall.com/p/gzzoxa)

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WhitneyLand
Congratulations guys, great to hear Ionic has good momentum.

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kgc
I tried to use this for a recent project but struggled with performance issues
on Android. Not recommended at this time for production.

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reedlaw
Could you elaborate? It would seem performance issues would be tied to
whatever Angular code is being written. Or are there UI issues?

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yesimahuman
Initially, we focused on iOS only just to get the alpha out in November. Turns
out demand for Android was huge, but we were doing things that worked well on
iOS (like box-shadow) and certain animations, but hurt Android performance on
sub 4.4 devices.

We've since built a system to gracefully fall back to less intensive
operations on older Androids, and we have made a good amount of progress on
Android performance over the last month (still more work to do as always).

As many hybrid app developers will tell you, older Androids are like dealing
with IE 6 when it comes to web. So we hope our work means a lot less for you.

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vladgur
Define older -- 4.1.x and later represent more than 50% of devices out there:

[http://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html](http://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html)

I agree with you on box-shadows -- its a big no-no in the android-land. There
are some things however android chrome does better than mobile safari,
batching browser repaints for instance. If you focus on CSS-driven
animations/interactions for your ui, you should be able to reduce the
performance issues on android though.

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jasonlotito
I wonder if there is any plans to fully support Android. By that, I mean, the
UI is iOS specific, and doesn't seem to adopt to the way Android does things.
Simply porting an iOS app to Android and reusing the same interface is
basically saying that Android is a second class citizen.

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iLoch
I can't speak for them, but it seems like their icon set at least supports
Android - perhaps the UI is just ultra flat, which you perceive to be an iOS
trait?

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jbeja
I think that is not flat because the iOS trait but performance, since
gradiants and other anti-flat UI properties are very expensive about it.

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jbeja
OMG, this is fabulous.

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notastartup
how does this measure up to Intel XDK?

