Flutter Release Preview 2 • Hacker News Board

Re: Flutter Release Preview 2

#101

Post by komuW » Thu, Sep 20, 2018, 1:21 PM UTC

MarkMc wrote: post #33

I first started developing with Flutter about a year ago. One thing that has really impressed me is how responsive the Flutter team is to developers. Often when I posted a question on Stack Overflow it would be answered perfectly within 24 hours by a member of the Flutter team. Contrast this with React Native where Facebook's attitude seems to be to develop what they need themselves then 'throw it over the wall' to f…

This has also been my experience thus far.

The devs in the dart[1] and flutter[2] gitter chatrooms are even faster at responding to questions, in my experience.

1. https://gitter.im/dart-lang/home

2. https://gitter.im/flutter/flutter

Re: Flutter Release Preview 2

#102

Post by RobertRoberts » Thu, Sep 20, 2018, 1:31 PM UTC

Bendingo wrote: post #53

RobertRoberts wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are attempting to present a solution to a problem you can't possibly help with. No individual at Google can assuage any concerns caused by the corporation as a whole. (maybe the CEO could?)

Assuage =/= Eliminate GP has certainly assuaged[1] (although not eliminated) my concerns. [1] assuage, verb, make (an unpleasant feeling) less intense.

But it's a false premise. It seems like petting a dog on the way to the vet. The petting just calms the dog down, but has no effect on the inevitability of his situation.

So what value is a useless and pointless gesture that appears to be a marketing/public relations tactic?

Re: Flutter Release Preview 2

#103

Post by RobertRoberts » Thu, Sep 20, 2018, 1:36 PM UTC

jrs95 wrote: post #55

RobertRoberts wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At one point there wasn't an alternative to Angular either, look what we have now. Not only that, there's still native. Which means anyone can easily hold out that is on the fence for who knows what comes in the future. Principles matter at some level, which is why many businesses abandoned Godaddy a few years back. But also there's simple budget considerations. Google has cost us tons of money over the years adjusti…

I'd argue people left GoDaddy because their services suck. At least, that's been my experience with them. And at the same time, what they were doing wasn't unique, you have nearly unlimited alternatives in that space. I hope you're right with the Angular comparison though, I would love to see other projects move in a direction that truly competes with what Flutter is doing. As for native...you're right, I'll continue…

The specific instance related to Godaddy that was the straw that broke things was the SOPA fiasco. Google has done many similar things, it could be argued even far worse things, and it's somehow survived so far. But to think it's any better of a company is to be myopic.

Well, I am in no hurry with Flutter, we will see how things turn out in the next few years.

Re: Flutter Release Preview 2

#104

Post by mixedCase » Thu, Sep 20, 2018, 2:19 PM UTC

jrs95 wrote: post #47

mixedCase wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, thanks for the data point. I'm actually fairly interested in Flutter, but I have no interest at all in Dart since I find it severely lacking compared to modern, more popular production languages for mobile development such as TypeScript or Kotlin (which have features such as algebraic data types which have become an absolute must-have for me and my team), to the point it completely deters me from adopting it. Is…

The great development experience is largely tied into Dart and it's toolchain, not to mention all of the underlying Dart code in the project. However, you can get the same kind of control flow out of Dart albeit with a little less static checking ( https://github.com/dart-lang/sdk/issues/33079 ) so from a pragmatic standpoint this really shouldn't be something that's holding you back. The cost of not having ADTs is m…

Hi. Thanks for the workaround, it's fairly similar to how it's handled in TS, except more verbose (which TS is already very much so when compared to something like Elm). That isn't a problem for me since I have some experience with functional programming, but that'll likely be a serious disincentive for other devs (TS itself has been a problem already). Maybe I'm off the mark and that is idiomatic and a very common Dart pattern, and can be assimilated through familiarity?

On another note, is there any workaround to have true non-nullable types?

As far as the cost of having one codebase goes, right now it's somewhat of a worse is better approach; we're looking into something that heavily improves things and is worth rewriting our apps into. RN hasn't been it due to its FFI/bridge problems not making us comfortable and Flutter is something we've been looking into but the language has been a deterrant, so it's hard for us to argue "yes it's better on every metric and worth the effort".

Re: Flutter Release Preview 2

#105

Post by HappySweeney » Thu, Sep 20, 2018, 2:33 PM UTC

Any word on the testing situation? Currently, my inaugural app has a bunch of tests which won't run as a) you can't use plugins in unit tests, and b) integration tests (via flutter drive) won't work with platform channels, as it has a dependency on dart:ui.

Re: Flutter Release Preview 2

#106

Post by rhodysurf » Thu, Sep 20, 2018, 3:09 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #79

threeseed wrote: post #10

I spent quite a few months comparing this with React Native. Flutter has done cross-platform right. And it's somewhat sad and counter-intuitive but pretending to be native is a lot better than actually being native. iOS and Android are just too dissimilar in areas to provide a common layer on top of. In particular routing which is a mess with React Native. Flutter also has the best development experience period. Noth…

I still don't see the selling point over Qt, Xamarin or using C++ with native views. React Native is not something that I would even consider, for that I would rather do Web apps/PWAs.

I am a Qt developer by day and mobile dev in my free time. QML on mobile is very ugly when compared with Flutter and its not even close.

Re: Flutter Release Preview 2

#107

Post by tym0 » Thu, Sep 20, 2018, 3:11 PM UTC

saagarjha wrote: post #85

Hixie wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Flutter TL here) I encourage you to compare our iOS ("cupertino") widgets with the UiKit ones. We've still got many to implement, but I think we have the fidelity pretty high for the ones we've implemented. If you disagree please do file bugs, we care very much about fidelity.

Do you have a widget catalog somewhere that I could try out on my device?

If you have an android device you can use Flutter Gallery [1], it has the Cupertino (iOS) widgets.

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.flutter.dem...

Re: Flutter Release Preview 2

#108

Post by danbalthasar » Thu, Sep 20, 2018, 3:44 PM UTC

saagarjha wrote: post #75

danbalthasar wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flutter takes full control of the rendering pipeline directly on both platforms - all the controls your seeing are written in Dart for Flutter, but designed to mimic the best of what the platform offers. In particular, this means that if you're running an Android app on an older device, it can still show the latest Material design widgets (and similarly for iOS, showing the latest Cupertino styled widgets, or Materia…

> Flutter takes full control of the rendering pipeline directly on both platforms - all the controls your seeing are written in Dart for Flutter, but designed to mimic the best of what the platform offers. You see, this is rarely what I want. I’ve seen time and time again people trying to emulate controls and it just doesn’t work. Apple has a whole team that’s spent years making the iOS UI look just the way it is, an…

I hear you. I was suspicious of this too, but there's been a lot of work put into making the controls we design work well and properly implement accessibility/native platform behaviors. And when something is off, someone ends up raising an issue and it gets fixed.

It also makes it very easy for developers to create their own custom widgets/layouts that are pretty challenging to achieve in other platforms.

I hope you'll give it a try some time - if nothing else, you might be able to raise some issues to help us improve some of those details!

Re: Flutter Release Preview 2

#109

Post by danbalthasar » Thu, Sep 20, 2018, 3:44 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #57

rohan1024 wrote: post #19

Are you frustrated with the way Android apps are developed? Tired of amount of time to get simple list working? Writing lot of boiler plate code only to update list from a dialog box? Ever got scared of implementing a navigation drawer or a fragment? Did you left Android development because the time and code to implement it was way greater than expected? Tired of handling life cycles? Sorry for being dramatic but if…

I rather use Qt and Xamarin for that purpose. More mature, may target desktop OSes and use languages that are actually relevant in the market during the last 20 years.

Flutter's edge over these technologies is faster development cycles (very fast build times, sub-second reloading without losing state, very rapid ability to update code/GUI after deployment to a testing device, and very fast render times).

Xamarin and Qt are fine products, and I know Xamarin has been working on some improvements over deploy times, but it still can't touch what Flutter does there. And if you know C++ and C# already, Dart is a breeze.

Re: Flutter Release Preview 2

#110

Post by MarkMc » Thu, Sep 20, 2018, 4:21 PM UTC

malkia wrote: post #58

There is also an effort to bring flutter on the desktop. I dabbled (briefly) in it, got flutter app running on windows + linux, though certain integration factors (smooth window resizing, stability, mouse wheel support, etc.) were not there yet. For some of them (mouse wheel, keyboard, tabbing) there might be more work needed (and maybe not seen as important), but it could bring a real "electron" killer, where my sla…

I'm working on a project to get Flutter running on Mac and Windows: https://feather-apps.com

There's also this project which uses Go to run Flutter on Windows and Linux: https://github.com/Drakirus/go-flutter-desktop-embedder

Is your Windows implementation publicly available? I'd be curious to check it out.