Ratchet

Prototype mobile apps with simple HTML, CSS and JS components.

Getting Started

Clone the repo git clone git@github.com:maker/ratchet.git or just download the bundled CSS and JS
Read the docs to learn about the components and how to get a prototype on your phone
We will have example apps to check out very soon!

Take note that our master branch is our active, unstable development branch and that if you're looking to download a stable copy of the repo, check the tagged downloads.

Support

Ratchet was developed to support iOS 5+ for iPhone. Questions or discussions about Ratchet should happen in the Google group or hit us up on Twitter @goRatchet.

Reporting bugs & contributing

Please file a Github issue to report a bug. When reporting a bug, be sure to follow the contributor guidelines.

Troubleshooting

A small list of "gotchas" are provided below for designers and developers starting to work with Ratchet

Ratchet is designed to respond to touch events from a mobile device. In order to use mouse click events (for desktop browsing and testing), you have a few options:
- Enable touch event emulation in Chrome (found in the overrides tab in the web inspector preferences)
- Use a javascript library like fingerblast.js to emulate touch events (ideally only loaded from desktop devices)
Script tags containing javascript will not be executed on pages that are loaded with push.js. If you would like to attach event handlers to elements on other pages, document-level event delegation is a common solution.
Ratchet uses XHR requests to fetch additional pages inside the application. Due to security concerns, modern browsers prevent XHR requests when opening files locally (aka using the file:/// protocol); consequently, Ratchet does not work when opened directly as a file.
- A common solution to this is to simply serve the files from a local server. One convenient way to achieve this is to run python -m SimpleHTTPServer <port> to serve up the files in the current directory to http://localhost:<port>

Future features

Ratchet is just getting started. Here are some of the immediate features we're thinking about:

Shelf (exposable left hand navigation a la Path or Facebook)
Gridviews
Notifications
Slide control
More list views options
Improved active states (especially for lists)
Docking list dividers
Touch library for richer touch events (swipes, long press, etc)
Autocomplete
Hiding title bar (hides with scroll)

Even these are just the short-term goals though. We eventually want to extend Ratchet beyond the prototying for iPhone and create HTML/CSS/JS components for iPad and Android devices. Our dream is that Ratchet becomes the best way to create mobile experiences with web standard languages.

Authors

Dave Gamache

Connor Sears

Jacob Thornton

License

Ratchet is licensed under the MIT License.

sr77in/ratchet