Fries

Fries is an awesome mobile development framework (yes, not just for prototyping!) for Android apps using just HTML, CSS, and Javascript and was inspired by Ratchet. We all know that you can find loads of iOS development tools out there, so this time let's give some love to Android.

Update: June 11, 2013

I won't be accepting pull requests to version 1.0.0 as its features are already pretty much set in stone. Please have a look at branch wip-1.0.1 and contribute there. And please follow the Contributing guide that I made.

What's New In Version 1.0.0

The initial push of Fries was generally made to see how the community would react to something like this. And I've seen great feedback so I think Fries needed a major overhaul. A lot of things were missing in the previous version and version 1.0.0 is a huge step from that.

Here's a list of new things in version 1.0.0:

• Fries is now optimized for PhoneGap.
• Added Android-like page transitions using stack.js (based on Ratchet's push.js). Since push.js is optimized for iOS-like transitions, I found it unsuitable to be used in Fries. stack.js mimics the page transitions in Android using CSS3 transforms and oh, did I mention it works smoothly?
• Your pages should now be wrapped in .page class for stack.js to work.
• Added bottom-positioned action bars and evenly spaced out action buttons using flex-box layout mode.
• Not using input[type=*] selectors to style input elements anymore. Input elements are now styled using classes (.input-text, etc). This was done so that the form elements can still be styled easily using custom CSS.
• Reworked tabs. Added tab content transition and active tab highlighting. Added tabs.js.
• Removed iScroll dependency, sadly. iScroll works like the native iOS so again, I found it unsuitable for Fries. You can still use it if you want to though.
• Reworked action-bars.js and spinner.js as the previous versions attach multiple event handlers causing unexpected results.
• Fries now uses the official Android icons. Thanks to Tobias Bieniek for this awesome icon font.

Getting Started

Fries is now optimized to run as a PhoneGap app. I found it hard to optimize on the mobile browser because of a few reasons:

• There's no way to remove the browser's navigation bar except by adding a few pixels of padding on the bottom of the page. (Correct me if I'm wrong)
• Adobe Edge Inspect (which I use for testing) renders differently from the mobile browser.
• It appears that there's an issue with the mobile browser's line-height property. If you check out the examples on your Android device's mobile browser, the text are slightly off-center vertically.

Now with all that said, head on over to the demo project to see how to setup your first Fries app.

Performance

Surprisingly, Fries works well with PhoneGap. I didn't expect the CSS transitions to be this fast. Check out this test video that I made to show how a Fries app looks on PhoneGap. Although there are still glitches (like the black lines that appear on pop screen transition), I think Fries still does great for an HTML5 mobile app.

Development Roadmap

Fries aims to make Android apps fast and easy using just HTML, CSS and JavaScript. In the long run, these are the following features and components that I think should be added to Fries:

• Scrollable Tabs
• Modals
• Other Form Elements
• Shelf Menus (a la Facebook or Path style menu)
• Loading Indicator
• Custom Scroller (iScroll is great but Fries aims to be as close to an Android app as possible)
• Typography
• Theming using LESS or SASS
• Automatic resizing of the action bars and tabs on landscape view. In a typical Android app, the action bars and tabs resizes to 40px from the default 48px.

Special Thanks

I'd like to thank Dave Gamache, Connor Sears, and Jacob Thornton for a wonderful job on Ratchet. The conversion of the official Android icons was done in IcoMoon.

License

The MIT License (MIT) Copyright (c) 2013 Jaune Sarmiento

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

Attribution

Official Android Icons

Portions of this page are modifications based on work created and shared by the Android Open Source Project and used according to terms described in the Creative Commons 2.5 Attribution License.

Android Action Bar Icon Pack

By Tobias Bieniek (https://github.com/Turbo87/Android-Action-Bar-Icon-Pack-Font) also under Creative Commons 2.5 License