Foundation for Apps, My Thoughts So Far

I have started using Foundation for Apps at work. Nothing serious; only playground related testing. Out of this has come some things I enjoy, and things I don’t enjoy.

The Good

Foundation for Apps is the newest Zurb “product”, and it is amazing in most ways! Dynamic routing and animations are two of my favorite features. Using dynamic routing is as simple as adding frontmatter onto a view file:

---
name: about
url: /about
---

Animations are handled the same way:

---
name: about
url: /about
animationIn: slideInLeft
animationOut: slideOurRight
---

In addition to these two features, the geniuses at Zurb have reengineered their grid system to use flexbox. Because of this I can build what feels like more of a module based UI.

The Bad

Because Foundation for Apps is fresh on the scene, documentation is good, but tutorials, walkthroughs, blog posts and any type of videos aren’t plenty.

The Ugly

There isn’t much documentation about the Angular side of Foundation for Apps, especially when it comes to structuring your source code. Currently there is no easy way to separate out controllers, services, filters, etc. into other files. This leads to putting everything into the app.js file which I do not find ideal. There is an issue in the GitHub repository for an explanation of how to correctly structure files and editing the Gulpfile to handle this new structure. I hope the Zurb team addresses this immediately.

In Closing

If you are on the fence about Foundation for Apps I would urge you to jump right in! I’m using it to rapidly prototype what may becomes a production grade healthcare application targeting iPads in the field.

If you want more information about Foundation for Apps check out the website or GitHub repository!