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Show HN: InKino – An open-source movie app made with Flutter

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Re: Show HN: InKino – An open-source movie app made with Flutter

#21

Post by jcelerier »

roughike wrote: post #17
egnehots wrote: post #16

cross platform = mobile only? What about desktop targets..

Like I said before in another comment, there's only so much I can fit in a Hacker News title. :) I'd like to think that a lot of people use the term "a cross-platform app" to mean "an app that works on Android and iOS" though. Or "an app that works on more than one platform using shared code". That being said, Flutter does have unofficial Linux and MacOS desktop embedders: https://github.com/google/flutter-desktop-em…

> I'd like to think that a lot of people use the term "a cross-platform app" to mean "an app that works on Android and iOS" though

uh.. wat ?

Re: Show HN: InKino – An open-source movie app made with Flutter

#22

Post by loftyal »

roughike wrote: post #10
rvanmil wrote: post #9

This looks really nice considering it's built with a cross platform framework. Did you also consider using React Native, and if so what made you decide to use Flutter instead? My team is looking to move away from Cordova for our cross platform mobile projects to either one of these so I'd be interested to hear about this. And thanks for open sourcing!

I've been using Flutter for a year now, and I've loved it since the first time I gave it a try. In my work, I've been using other cross-platform technologies, such as Xamarin and React Native briefly (actually currently doing a customer project with RN). In my experience, RN is not that bad and mostly gets the job done, but I've grown to like Flutter more. The tooling and documentation are top-notch ("it just works")…

Just FYI, Expo which is bundled with create-react-native-app would solve the problems with linear.

- https://docs.expo.io/versions/latest/sdk/linear-gradient

Re: Show HN: InKino – An open-source movie app made with Flutter

#23

Post by swah »

roughike wrote: post #10
rvanmil wrote: post #9

This looks really nice considering it's built with a cross platform framework. Did you also consider using React Native, and if so what made you decide to use Flutter instead? My team is looking to move away from Cordova for our cross platform mobile projects to either one of these so I'd be interested to hear about this. And thanks for open sourcing!

I've been using Flutter for a year now, and I've loved it since the first time I gave it a try. In my work, I've been using other cross-platform technologies, such as Xamarin and React Native briefly (actually currently doing a customer project with RN). In my experience, RN is not that bad and mostly gets the job done, but I've grown to like Flutter more. The tooling and documentation are top-notch ("it just works")…

I've been using React Native too and my experience is: I accomplish a lof of stuff in a few days, then lose a whole day trying to hack a custom Picker element or similar. Grrr.

Re: Show HN: InKino – An open-source movie app made with Flutter

#24

Post by aepiepaey »

dang wrote: post #3
unop wrote: post #2

Hmm, the HN title is grossly misleading.. I wonder why?

What is misleading, and what would be a better title?

Mainly "cross platform". Many people would interpret that as [desktop] platforms, e.g. Linux/Windows/Mac OS. Especially if you weren't previously aware of what Flutter is.

Adding a "mobile" in there somewhere would be a significant improvement.

In addition "movie app" is a bit underspecified. Maybe it's for managing movies? Editing them? Playing them?

Especially when both confusions are combined, it can be easy to get the wrong idea of what the submission is.

Re: Show HN: InKino – An open-source movie app made with Flutter

#26

Post by pvinis »

aepiepaey wrote: post #24
dang wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is misleading, and what would be a better title?

Mainly "cross platform". Many people would interpret that as [desktop] platforms, e.g. Linux/Windows/Mac OS. Especially if you weren't previously aware of what Flutter is. Adding a "mobile" in there somewhere would be a significant improvement. In addition "movie app" is a bit underspecified. Maybe it's for managing movies? Editing them? Playing them? Especially when both confusions are combined, it can be easy to ge…

Yes but "app" is usually what you run on your phone, "application" is what you run on your computer, no?

Re: Show HN: InKino – An open-source movie app made with Flutter

#27

Post by roughike »

kvgr wrote: post #25

I have been recently looking into flutter, because I want to start developing multiplatform apps. What is the coding time compared to android? How does it behave with networking/camera?

For the difference in coding time, it's hard to estimate. I'd say once you get the hang of it, which for me was quite fast, it's much more pleasant and generally faster than working with native Android. Hard UI related things on Android (rounded corners or customizing the design library components) are pleasant to do and make a lot of sense in Flutter.

Flutter and Dart come with a nice HTTP library out of the box. In my experience, it does everything you'd expect from a networking library. If you're looking for something like Retrofit on Android, there's a package called "jaguar_http" that does the job.

For taking/picking images, you'd use the officially supported "image_picker" plugin. It exposes a nice API based on Dart's Futures and handles Android's onActivityResult dance for you in the background. If you're looking into embedding a camera preview in a Flutter app, there's a package called "camera" for that.

There's generally a plugin that handles the platform stuff you need to do. If not, you can always create one and use Java/Kotlin/Swift/ObjC code to call the native SDK APIs you need yourself. Having published a couple plugins myself, I've found the plugin system to be really nice.

Re: Show HN: InKino – An open-source movie app made with Flutter

#28

Post by bschwindHN »

roughike wrote: post #10
rvanmil wrote: post #9

This looks really nice considering it's built with a cross platform framework. Did you also consider using React Native, and if so what made you decide to use Flutter instead? My team is looking to move away from Cordova for our cross platform mobile projects to either one of these so I'd be interested to hear about this. And thanks for open sourcing!

I've been using Flutter for a year now, and I've loved it since the first time I gave it a try. In my work, I've been using other cross-platform technologies, such as Xamarin and React Native briefly (actually currently doing a customer project with RN). In my experience, RN is not that bad and mostly gets the job done, but I've grown to like Flutter more. The tooling and documentation are top-notch ("it just works")…

I've been starting work with Flutter over the past couple weeks. The tooling and general experience so far has been pretty nice, though it doesn't always "just work". The fact that flutter is so coupled to Cocoapods is a disappointment and it means your build system is dependent on Cocoapods not screwing up - quite a tall order. I already ran into an issue that required me to generate a new project, copy my source over to get a working app again, then inspect the source trees to see what went wrong. It turned out to be a Cocoapod symlink issue or something to that effect. Not entirely a Flutter issue but something to be wary of.

Some good points of Flutter so far:

* Hot reloading is fast, much easier to iterate on designs and experiments

* Plugins seem to be easy to make, they made an architecture that focuses on minimal boilerplate

* Being able to use async-await syntax on a whole UI view is a cool idea (like Android's onActivityResult() with much less typing involved). Push a view onto the navigation stack, let it collect input from the user, pop off the stack with a data structure representing the user input)

* Animations are easy

* Minimal opening of Xcode. Most days I can get by without ever opening it.

* Data flow architectures like the Elm Architecture or Redux are well supported

Some not-so-good points:

* Having null

* Material design is pushed way too hard - Cupertino widget documentation/examples are lacking

* Code generation needed for JSON parsing

* State for StatefulWidgets are generic over the Widget and not the other way around - I would have expected a StatefulWidget to be generic over a State e.g. `MyHomePage extends StatefulWidget`

* Because of the previous point, the UI building function, build(), is usually on the State class and not the Widget class

* My relatively barebones app is around 33MB on iOS

Overall though I like it! Lots of good ideas and tooling. I one day want to create something with a similar architecture using a language like Rust instead of Dart, and native UI components instead of reimplementing the entirety of Android and iOS component behavior.

Re: Show HN: InKino – An open-source movie app made with Flutter

#29

Post by roughike »

bschwindHN wrote: post #28
roughike wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using Flutter for a year now, and I've loved it since the first time I gave it a try. In my work, I've been using other cross-platform technologies, such as Xamarin and React Native briefly (actually currently doing a customer project with RN). In my experience, RN is not that bad and mostly gets the job done, but I've grown to like Flutter more. The tooling and documentation are top-notch ("it just works")…

I've been starting work with Flutter over the past couple weeks. The tooling and general experience so far has been pretty nice, though it doesn't always "just work". The fact that flutter is so coupled to Cocoapods is a disappointment and it means your build system is dependent on Cocoapods not screwing up - quite a tall order. I already ran into an issue that required me to generate a new project, copy my source ov…

I don't really agree about pushing hard on Material Design. Sure, the current widget situation might be skewed towards Material components and Cupertino is lacking. For Material widgets, they've implemented almost everything, even the most obscure ones. But I think they're pushing more for customized UIs. Meaning, UIs that don't look Material or Cupertino, but are more of a branded experience, think Spotify, Tinder, Snapchat, etc. Designs that don't really conform to Material or iOS design languages. The Hamilton app is a good example of this. Sadly, I'm not a UI designer so I went with Material Design on this inKino app since that's an easy route for me.

With your other points, I generally agree. Didn't mean to imply that it "just works" 100% of the time. But compared to other cross-platform dev tools / SDKs I've used, I feel like Flutter does such a great job in the tooling department.

Re: Show HN: InKino – An open-source movie app made with Flutter

#30

Post by Sileni »

Beautiful work. I was actually looking for a mobile platform to build my newest project on, looks like I'm learning a bit of Dart. Hope you don't mind if I dig through your project every time I get stuck, it looks like you're using a lot of similar functionality :)
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