There is no UIKit for the Web
… because there are many.
I am building a web application and … I need a UI Kit. I am tempted to start with a clean slate, an empty CSS file, but first I’ll look around. I feel weird because I never needed this scouting when I built iOS apps for clients. The starting point was always UIKit, like it or not. It has pros and cons, but it saves you from the situation I am in: choosing a framework (or starting from scratch). Sometimes having no options is a time saver :)
Looking around I stumbled upon a bunch of interesting sites:
- http://cssframeworks.org
- http://speckyboy.com/2013/09/25/10-free-ui-kits/
- http://www.csshero.org/css-frameworks-use-comparing-5-popular-css-frameworks/
There’s a lot to scratch your head. I am looking for something as simple as possible. Much like with the blog I’d like to avoid CSS code spread across multiple intertwined files. I am probably not even building a responsive app because there will be a native one. Adopting some of those frameworks would probably give me some speed at the beginning but I am sure I’ll end up in a situation in which I don’t understand quickly how to tweak something or how to fix a bug. At the moment I am confused, but it’s part of the search phase. I’ll keep you posted.
If you have some suggestion let me know on Twitter.
PS: For AppVersion I used a custom UI built on top of Bootstrap. I ended up with a 40KB CSS file and a 51KB JavaScript file. I am not super happy with it but it got the job done.