# 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](http://maker.github.com/ratchet/ratchet.zip) the bundled CSS and JS
- [Read the docs](http://maker.github.com/ratchet) 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](https://github.com/maker/ratchet/tags).

## Support

Ratchet was developed to support iOS 5+ for iPhone. Questions or discussions about Ratchet should happen in the [Google group](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/goratchet) or hit us up on Twitter [@goRatchet](http://www.twitter.com/goratchet).

## Reporting bugs & contributing

Please file a Github issue to [report a bug](http://github.com/maker/ratchet/issues). When reporting a bug, be sure to follow the [contributor guidelines](https://github.com/maker/ratchet/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md).

## 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

- http://twitter.com/dhg
- http://github.com/dhgamache

Connor Sears

- http://twitter.com/connors
- http://github.com/connors

Jacob Thornton

- http://twitter.com/fat
- http://github.com/fat


## License

Ratchet is licensed under the [MIT License](http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT).