I never thought I’d ever see a non native app working so smoothly.ionic_logo
Get your Android / iPhone and install Sworkit app on it.
Here are some pictures from the App:

Sworkit-IonicSworkit-Ionic2

The interface runs very smoothly and looks amazing.
Did you know that this app is running under Cordova (like PhoneGap, but not Adobe owned)?
Not only that, it’s running with AngularJS!

How is this possible? Ionic framework.

Ionic framework is basically a bundle of SASS & CSS to make your app look as close to native as possible, as well as some JS for a lot of functionality (on top of AngularJS as I mentioned).
The way the CSS components are built is fairly similar to Bootstrap, and very well documented too.
The Javascript part of Ionic is where it gets interesting in my opinion, with the almost exclusive use of custom HTML tags which seems to be the direction web dev is going in general (reminds me of Polymer).

All the basic functionality is covered, from known components like side menus (with the 3 lines icon that slides from the left), lists, scrolls, loading screens, to more complicated things like Action Sheet:

Ionic-action-sheet
(holy crap, this is out of the box!)
These days there’s no framework without an awesome icon set, and Ionic definitely delivers!

Ionic is actively developed by a team of talented developers, known as Drifty (can’t say I know many developers coming from Wisconsin, on the map baby!).
For those who don’t want to start installing Node, Cordova, Android SDK, there’s a Vagrant image for that delivered by Drifty. This is Android only.

I think Ionic is the best evolution I’ve seen for Mobile Web Apps (aka Hybrid Apps) thus far.
Cordova’s development has been exploding in the last year or two, the plugins directory finally has some real numbers (372 is pretty good).

The only thing that I see missing is a word from Apple / Google, none of which seems to be moving in a direction supporting Web technologies natively.

Until next time.