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Show HN: nativeCSS launches iOS apps styling with CSS (nativecss.com)
25 points by peternash on Feb 4, 2013 | hide | past | favorite | 15 comments


I just tried out NUI this weekend (https://github.com/createch/bullrunnerapp), and ended up abandoning halfway through. My code became worse because of it. Some of the style code is in the ViewController, some of it is in the NSS file. Going to have to test nativeCSS.

Looks like this could be better than NUI. Unlike NUI:

- You can have multiple selectors, like in normal CSS

- More css-like names, border-radius (rather than border-width as NUI calls it)

- Shorthand properties border: 1px solid #fff;

- Shorthand color codes: #fff

    textview,textfield{
       border-radius:0px;
       background-color:#fff; 
       padding:5px;
       border:1px solid darkgrey;
       margin:auto;
       width:90%;
    }
Also, $10/app is much better than Pixate's $199 license.

https://github.com/tombenner/nui http://www.pixate.com/


Website does not give me any reason why would I prefer this to iOS appearance proxy. Is there any?


iOS appearance proxy is good at setting a few styles on standard apple components. But CSS is more powerful, easily shared and cross platform then iOS code!


There's a video here: http://youtu.be/SgdFxiY5nvg

And a sample app you can play with here: http://nativecss.com/docs/tutorials/intro/ios


It would be really great to see an actual running example so we could look at it on our device. (edit - like the pixate playground app on the store - for those of us who are too lazy to set up a new project just to give it a quick look!)



Sweet! Is there going to be an Android version?



The Android version is in private beta, shoot me your email and I'll email you when it's ready. I've got a release planned for Valentine's day!


Doubt how good it is compared to Pixate which has fabulous Playground demo app in AppStore.


Well a bit of healthy competition would be good for both of us!


Is this something like PhoneGap to mix HTML/JS and native code?


So phonegap uses CSS to style, but JS as code.

My vision is CSS is great to style, but using standard native components will always be quicker than JS libraries like Phonegap and the sort.


perhaps you'd like to use -nativecss as the prefix rather than -ios? you'd hope styles would be portable across platforms?


Good point, my reasoning was that I kept getting confused between -ncss, -nativecss, -nc, so I kept it -ios and -android.




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