Stampede Design
Have you tried out Ionic yet? If you haven’t, check out our previous post on Getting Started With Ionic to get a head start in hybrid mobile app development. This time around, we took the liberty to find out what this versatile framework offers as a service to its framework.
Random Facts About Ionic
- Founded on 2012 by Ben Sperry (CEO) and Max Lynch (CTO)
- Both worked at other startups developing mobile MMORPG games
- Was known as Drifty before
- Secured their 1st Million seed funding from Arthur Ventures on March 2014
- Launched 1.0.0 (uranium-unicorn) on May 12, 2015
There are products and services offered by the developers that aid in the development of Ionic-created applications. Surprisingly there are people who are not aware of its existence. Here’s a helpful list of 10 things you need to know when developing with Ionic.
Ionic View
Ionic View makes it easy to share your Ionic and Cordova apps with clients and testers around the world, all without ever going through the App Store. It’s really easy as you can share it with other people by just providing them with an assigned key or inviting them via email. Provided they have downloaded the client application which is currently available for both iOS and Android.
Ionic Lab
What is Lab?
Lab harnesses the power of the Ionic CLI through a beautiful and intuitive desktop app for both Windows and Mac. Watch all your cross-platform Ionic projects come to life in minutes.
Who is it for?
Lab is built for Ionic developers and designers to get awesome websites up and running fast, with less work, digging, and headaches.
Why you’ll love it.
Life is too short to dig through docs when you just want to build. Combine your toolset into one simple GUI that guides you through the Ionic app development cycle.
Ionic Creator
Creator is a drag-&-drop prototyping tool for creating great apps using Ionic, with just a click of the mouse. This is most suitable for designers who would want to turn their design into a hi-fidelity prototype. They have their design and they can just use Ionic Creator to build it. Click, move, and place premade mobile components onto your screen with their easy-to-use drag & drop technology.
Creator makes prototyping real mobile apps dead-simple.
- Drag and drop components. Visually build your app by dragging in pre-made mobile components into the device emulator.
- Preview and share. Preview and interact with your projects live on your devices. Share with colleagues and clients alike.
- Export and deploy. Export a fully functional Ionic project, or even native IPA & APK files to install directly on your devices.
Ionic Platform
A cloud platform for managing and scaling cross-platform mobile apps. Integrated services enable you and your team to build, deploy, and grow your apps efficiently.
Ionic Platform lets you spend more time on your app. It takes care of the rest, with a suite of powerful mobile back-end services for apps of all shapes and sizes.
Powerful tools, all in one place
The one central hub to engage with and manage your users, deploy live updates, and track your native builds.
Developer focused
Developers are at the heart of every great app. Our platform makes designing and developing apps a joy.
Built with teams in mind
Invite team members to collaborate on your Ionic apps with unique developer accounts and more.
Designed to work seamlessly with Ionic Framework
The Ionic Platform has been built to work beautifully with apps built using the open source Ionic Framework.
Check out Platform Beta Site for Ionic Platform
Ionic Market
It packs the most essential UI features into easy-to-use, lightweight, performance components that help you build your hybrid mobile app. In the course of building Ionic, the developers had to make decisions about what to include and what to leave out. Should they bake a custom calendar interface into Ionic? How different should the Android and iOS styles be? What about the inclusion themes?
This is basically a place to go if you need to find assets for your Ionic App. Discover & share Ionic Starter, Plugin, and Theme for your app. Most suitable for developers who would want to think less about coming up with designs or assets. They can just browse through the market and get what is suitable to make their application or prototypes much more presentable. Not bad eh?
Ionic Icons
The premium icon font for Ionic Framework. Lots of premade icons made for ionic developers. No more squeezing the brain to look for other icon libraries while developing. Make development more focused on its functionality rather than going through the Internet looking for the suitable icons pack.
The next four are subsets of Ionic App Dashboard, a powerful Ionic app services and tools.
Ionic Push
Ionic Push lets you create targeted push notifications through a simple dashboard that will be sent automatically when users match specific criteria, and offers a simple API to send push notifications from your own servers. Both iOS and Android devices are supported.
Ionic Analytic
Ionic Analytics, which gives you all the data you need to better understand and optimize your push notifications, deployments, and much, much more. Understanding how users respond to your app is incredibly valuable, as it allows you to identify unique patterns in behaviour and adjust your app accordingly. It takes the guesswork out of app design, letting you make informed decisions, based on real data from your entire user base.
Ionic Deploy
Ionic Deploy lets you update your app on demand for any changes that do not require binary modifications, saving you days, or even weeks, of wait time.
You can roll back to a previous version of your app, automatically apply updates, and control every aspect of the upgrade.
Being able to make live changes to an app allows you to work with your designer or other team members to collaborate in real time, empowering you to get immediate feedback while you develop and make changes on the fly.
Ionic Package
Building your app for distribution can be tough. Setting up your machine to target multiple platforms is an incredibly difficult process, and depending on your operating system, literally impossible!
The Ionic Package service allows you to create development and production builds of your app that can be submitted to the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, or be installed directly on your friends’, family members’, and colleagues’ devices.
And there you have it, these are 10 things that can be of great help to your endeavor with Ionic. Drop us a comment if you have any suggestions or questions about these support products for Ionic!