Sleep well with Ohalog and Onsen UI

Ohalog (オハログ) is a new and free Onsen UI application which analyzes and logs your sleep and helps you to find the optimal conditions to rest better. This app was made by the same team that also developed the famous Unlog (ウンログ) app, which already has more than 300.000 users in Japan.

Takashi Taguchi (田口敬), Shinsuke Ito (伊藤新助) and Kuniaki Suzuki (鈴木邦章) are the guys who make up the team that developed the Ohalog app, a project which has received some investment from NTT Docomo Ventures. We went to meet them face-to-face to chat about their app and their experience using Onsen UI.

Their previous job, Unlog, is a native app developed for Android and iOS in Japan that has reached a quite good number of downloads in Google Play and the App Store. This time, however, they decided to go for hybrid development since their time availability was shorter than before and they needed to develop for both Android and iOS. At this point, they considered different UI frameworks like Polymer and Ionic, but they finally chose Onsen UI for their new app thanks to its design, documentation, demos and available templates that can be quickly tested on Monaca.

It was their first experience with a framework like this and with Cordova in general but looks like they managed to do a good job once again. Ohalog includes custom plugins such as sending images to LINE, an instant messaging service popular in Japan, and around 10 other Cordova plugins, some of which had to be rewritten to suit their needs. They are quite happy with Cordova and Onsen UI and want to continue using these technologies for future applications. They already have a new app in the works and another one planned. Both using Onsen UI.

Fortunately, we’ve got as well a lot of feedback from them about Onsen UI framework: events documentation, LazyRepeat fix, native-like lift animation, promises for ons.notification and more. We still have room to improve many aspects and we are willing to fix and release new features demanded by our users. Therefore, this kind of feedback is very well received.

If you are developing an app with Onsen UI we would like to hear from you as well! Let us know what you think about it and any suggestion to improve. We really appreciate it! And, of course, if you want to improve your sleep from tonight, consider giving Ohalog a try. :)

Originally published at onsen.io on June 11, 2015.