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Google's cross-platform Flutter UI toolkit goes 1.0

techcrunch.com

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Re: Google's cross-platform Flutter UI toolkit goes 1.0

#22

Post by danbalthasar »

gpantazes wrote: post #16
bsimpson wrote: post #5

Flutter renders the whole UI, like a game engine. In the past, this has meant that if there isn't a Flutter implemention of a component (like a video player or map), you couldn't add it to your app. I don't know if that's still true. [edit]: It looks like this has been addressed with the PlatformView widget: https://developers.googleblog.com/2018/12/flutter-10-googles... [edit]: Sorry, bluetidepro - this was supposed…

I hated this about CoronaSDK (how the framework would render everything like a game engine to one canvas). It was so much harder to debug things if the only way you can debug components is only within the scope of the framework, and you don't have any of the benefits of using the native views/containers. This means you can't effectively use Appium or UIAutomator or anything nice like that. If Flutter does render ever…

There's a demo of running native tests that also test flutter on iOS here: https://github.com/flutter/ios_add2app

Re: Google's cross-platform Flutter UI toolkit goes 1.0

#23

Post by mikece »

Google has a history of introducing products and then killing them. For developing mobile apps they currently support "vendor native" via Android Studio using Java or Kotlin, Progressive Web Apps, and now Flutter.

Will Google really support all three over the long term?

Re: Google's cross-platform Flutter UI toolkit goes 1.0

#26

Post by stefan_ »

bsimpson wrote: post #5

Flutter renders the whole UI, like a game engine. In the past, this has meant that if there isn't a Flutter implemention of a component (like a video player or map), you couldn't add it to your app. I don't know if that's still true. [edit]: It looks like this has been addressed with the PlatformView widget: https://developers.googleblog.com/2018/12/flutter-10-googles... [edit]: Sorry, bluetidepro - this was supposed…

That's modern development for you. Shipping a copy of Skia so you can render exact facsimiles of Android widgets to a Vulkan context and avoid having Android render Android widgets with Skia to a Vulkan context.

A full Chrome copy for your desktop app is whatever, we have the resources, but on smartphones this is actively harmful. It bypasses the hardware compositors. Displaying a video, they have to render that to a graphics texture; on many smartphones, the IP that is doing hardware video decoding has nothing to do with the GPU and they might very well not use the same formats, requiring CPU conversion (if it's at all possible).

Re: Google's cross-platform Flutter UI toolkit goes 1.0

#28

Post by CraftThatBlock »

mikece wrote: post #20
mixmastamyk wrote: post #17

Would like to use it for a Linux app. Looking forward to when that has first class support.

The widget layer is written in C++ (Skia). There's no reason the Flutter toolkit couldn't be quickly adapted to Linux. Or FreeBSD. Or Windows, macOS, OS/2 or even Windows Mobile.

It does currently work on Linux, although fairly barebones. You can Google "Fluttet desktop"

Re: Google's cross-platform Flutter UI toolkit goes 1.0

#29

Post by CraftThatBlock »

mikece wrote: post #23

Google has a history of introducing products and then killing them. For developing mobile apps they currently support "vendor native" via Android Studio using Java or Kotlin, Progressive Web Apps, and now Flutter. Will Google really support all three over the long term?

Google rarely kill open source projects.
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