A few noob questions

After spending my first full day with Ionic I can safely say that I love it! However, I’m still a bit fuzzy on a few best practices, so I figured I’d try to get some clarification. Here are my questions:

Note: I used the tabs starter as a basis for my current code

  1. If I want to override the header for a single view / template, how would I do that? For example, on one of my templates, I’d like there to be a search box in the header. I realize I could replicate the header inside each view, but is there a better option?
  2. I have an ion-list setup and a custom filter to ‘search’ through it. The items have an odd (slide left?) type of animation when they get hidden upon being filtered… what’s going on here?
  3. Is there a list of best practices for common scenarios somewhere? Also, in addition to the weather sample app, are there any other great open-source apps I could dig into?
  4. If I refresh on a ‘detail’ type of page, the ‘back ->’ button in the navbar goes away… how can I avoid this?
  5. Is it better to use ui-router's resolve to pre-load my data, or should I create a loading indicator and do it in my controller with a .then() ?
  6. Authentication – could someone point me in the right direction here? I’m thinking of using firebase, but would also like users to be able to connect it to their facebook or google accounts. A nudge in the right direction would be much appreciated.

Hopefully these questions make sense! I feel like a lot of my issues so far are common pitfalls and I’m just looking to understand a little more about what might be going on in such scenarios, or what best practices are. Thanks!