Show HN: I built this in 5 minutes, and this is why Ratchet is awesome
github.comI give up. I failed to find the awesomeness. I see a login form (view). Ratchet is an MVC framework, your page does nothing. :(
The awesomeness in my opinion is that a) this took me literally five minutes which means that I had to write absolutely none of my own CSS classes for mobile prototyping, the wonderful guys who developed Ratchet did that for me already! Also, Ratchet is not an MVC framework, it's a front-end iPhone targeted mobile prototyping framework. It allows you to prototype a mobile UI with HTML/CSS/JS faster than prototyping in native Objective-C. At first glance, I honestly think these guys are being humble by calling it a prototyping framework. I could see myself using this for mobile web versions of my apps, although that does presuppose that everything "works" pretty closely to the level one would expect it to reading the docs on their homepage. Check out the link I posted in another comment, you might be confusing Ratchet with something else.
Interesting, so how is it different from something like jQuery mobile?
I think it really comes down to a matter of preference. This looks interesting to me, and it caught my eye when I saw it on Hacker News much in the same way Meteor did when it came out. For me personally, it just passed the initial smell test really well.
In terms of some concrete attributes which I like, I think it probably is the best framework I've seen in terms of the general aesthetic. I have high hopes that it will allow me to create most of the view elements I'd need to prototype in an incredibly short period of time. I haven't used jQuery mobile for some time now (> 1 year) yet it seems like there are more CSS classes in Ratchet that mimic the iOS look and feel well enough that one could develop a full iOS app prototype in a day or less. If I remember correctly from using jQuery mobile, there was a bit more code to write, and the general look just didn't feel as good to me.
UPDATE: This was probably really stupid of me to do right now, but I've been wanting to change my GitHub name for awhile... and just did... so if anyone would like to checkout the repo you can find it now at https://github.com/kulte/ratchet-signup
You forgot the sign up button! :-)
It has a form (missing a submit button) and then an "OR, sign up with Facebook".
Looks great, is there a hosted link somewhere for people to play with without having to download?
If what you mean is there a CDN for the Ratchet javascript, I don't think so. If you go to the website http://maker.github.com/ratchet/ there is a download link, but my repo just augments what you get in the download folder... like I said, 5 minutes :)
EDIT: I see what you mean now, no I didn't put up a hosted link since I just developed the one screen during a 5 min break. That's a decent idea though, maybe I'll make a full demo application (maybe I'll make it a Todo list, no one has ever used that for a demo app before) and put it up on Heroku.
Posted a copy at http://clay.cc/w53g2/
Hey, that's great, but you could already do rapid app prototyping all the way to full app development with Kendo Mobile. Paired with PhoneGap it's a highly productive way to build an app.
Thanks for mentioning Kendo, hadn't heard of it, just checked it out though... kinda pricey :) I think it's pretty awesome that someone developed a free, open-source mobile UI prototyping framework.
Can you give me some examples of apps built with Kendo Mobile so I can see how it actually performs?
I built the ReMeme app for iOS and Android using Kendo Mobile.