Little progress update here regarding the big overhaul I’m doing of my app, MoneyPhone. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts the app was originally written in HTML/CSS/JavaScript using Apache Cordova and Materialize for all of the styling. For the big re-write however I was looking to move on from Materialize and select something more geared towards hybrid application development as opposed to traditional web development. For awhile I was looking into Framework7 because of how great it looks.

But after I actually got started playing around with Framework7 I found it to be too complicated for my liking. If you happen to already use React or Vue.js I’m sure Framework7 is great. But if you’re like me and you are just sort of use to hacking on HTML/CSS/JavaScript using Bootstrap and whatnot without a fancy single page application framework, you might find that Framework7 and some of the other UI Frameworks for HTML5/Apache-Cordova development are a little too complicated and pretty much require that you use some sort of SPA framework .

Luckily, I happened to read about Ratchet, a super simple HTML5 framework for Apache-Cordova development created by one of the guys at Bootstrap. Initially I thought that Ratchet was going to end up looking too outdated as the project hasn’t been updated in 3 years and the Android theme styling looks very Jelly-Bean/KitKat-esque. However, I found that by simply using the default styling and ditching the platform specific themes altogether Ratchet rocks! While it may not be as polished as something like Framework7, it makes up for any lacking in this department with ease of use. Whereas I pretty much found myself stuck trying to figure out how to use Framework7 without React or Vue, I was able to crank out a mockup for the latest version of my app in a few hours before and after work today:

UPDATE (7/25/2019): Just noticed my math is a little wrong there in the mockup… LOL