Alyssa Nicoll

Charles Max Wood

In this episode of Adventures in Angular, the panelists talk with Mike Hartington, who is a Developer Advocate at Ionic. They talk in depth about the recently released version of Ionic, future projects the Ionic team is working on and what’s out there for Angular developers.

0:22 - Advertisement - Sentry - Use code “devchat” to get two months free on Sentry’s small plan.

1:21 - Mike introduces himself briefly and explains what exactly Ionic is.

3:15 - Charles asks about the new features of the recently released Ionic version 4.0. Mike explains that even though they love Angular, they wanted to decouple from any full framework like that and ship the components as JavaScript web components and then provide wrappings from any available framework. They spent a year on working on it and tried to double down on framework specific tooling.

5:50 - Charles asks if Alyssa has worked on Ionic. She answers that she hasn’t but has heard a lot of good things about it. She asks Mike if Ionic is the same as NativeScript. While explaining the difference, Mike replies that the team likes to work on the web technologies’ side, so even if Ionic is deployed on any available OS, everything is rendered in the browser. Charles also talks about the differences between NativeScript and Ionic.

7:38 - Alyssa asks if there is any specific popular framework or groups of people using Ionic. Mike answers that a lot of their user base consists of Angular developers, but they are seeing growth elsewhere too.

8:40 - Charles mentions that people like the fact they don’t have to learn different technologies for different platforms while developing apps, and prefer to do it by porting work from one platform to another. Mike agrees while saying that Ionic is a great option for that and it comes with a decent UI.

9:30 - Charles asks about Electron, if it’s the same codebase. Mike answers that Electron is quite new to them, but they are building an option for the native compiler that solves many technical issues and introduces new ideas on how to work with common APIs for IOS, Android and Electron.

12:02 - Alyssa asks how does Ionic compare to various UI themes and whether it can be customized. Mike answers that they have two themes - an iOS theme and a default material design theme. He says that they also have an option of creating custom themes using CSS variables.

13:30 - Charles asks if they have an update to the UI builder as well. Mike answers in affirmative and explains that they are working on a tool called Studio and proceeds to give some historical background on how they got there. He elaborates on the features of Studio.

15:40 - Alyssa asks if the tool is still under development or they are ready to start using it. Mike answers that a small group of users is using it and they are focusing on enterprise users currently.

16:50 - Charles asks about the next steps after Ionic 4.0. Mike explains in detail says that they want to work on some Angular tooling and on maintaining an update schematic.

18:17 - They discuss on how having different options help developers and users make flexible decisions leading to better products.

19:15 - Mike says that he is going to be at VueConf in Florida in March and Ng-Conf in Salt Lake City, and he is active on Twitter, Reddit and Instagram.

22:36 - Charles asks if there is any tutorial on Ionic for beginners. Mike asks users to search for “Ionic 4 Crash Course” - a 15-minute video encapsulating everything that they need to get it up and running.

22:35 - Advertisement - Angular Bootcamp

24:20 - Picks!

28:04 - END - Advertisement - CacheFly!

 

Special Guest: Mike Hartington.