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Flutter: a Portable UI Framework for Mobile, Web, Embedded, and Desktop

developers.googleblog.com

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Re: Flutter: a Portable UI Framework for Mobile, Web, Embedded, and Desktop

#61

Post by Hixie »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #51

Does the runtime work on Linux, i.e. Debian, Ubuntu, rather than ChromeOS?

(I'm the Flutter TL.)

As a target platform or as a development platform?

We don't support targeting Linux out of the box today, but we support Linux as a first-class development platform (it's what I use). That said, we do work on Linux, and if you're willing to do a bit of work, you can use it to write Linux apps. If you want to target X11, you'll need something like https://github.com/google/flutter-desktop-embedding whereas if you want to target the hardware directly, you can do something like https://medium.com/flutter-io/flutter-on-raspberry-pi-mostly... .

Re: Flutter: a Portable UI Framework for Mobile, Web, Embedded, and Desktop

#62

Post by saagarjha »

vetinari wrote: post #34
saagarjha wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure why this is downvoted, as it summarizes Flutter pretty well. Flutter’s “Cupertino” theme is obviously an emulation if you use it for more than a minute. If you want your app to look like an Android app on both platforms, though, I think it does pretty well at that.

> If you want your app to look like an Android app on both platforms Funny thing is, that it is emulated on Android as well.

It is, but I trust a Google team to get that to work at least passably well.

Re: Flutter: a Portable UI Framework for Mobile, Web, Embedded, and Desktop

#63

Post by _eric »

michaelchisari wrote: post #41
gjmacd wrote: post #33

We need to learn yet another language (Dart)? No thanks.

It's a bloody simple language to learn if you already know one of the similar modern typed languages (Typescript, Swift, Kotlin, etc). You can honestly pick it up in a weekend, there's nothing particularly new or groundbreaking.

Agreed. I love Typescript and picking up Dart has been quiet easy. Of course there's much more than the language itself, but other than one detail or another, tha transition seems to be fairly easy.

Re: Flutter: a Portable UI Framework for Mobile, Web, Embedded, and Desktop

#64

Post by Hixie »

eitland wrote: post #22
wstrange wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flutter apps can now target the chrome browser (preview at this point). So a chromebook can run Flutter apps via the browser OR via an Android Flutter app.

Are you saying this isn't a web framework but rather a Chrome framework??

(I'm the Flutter TL.)

We support targeting the Web (that's the tech preview we released today), and we support targeting Android, both of which ChromeOS support. We also support development on ChromeOS.

Re: Flutter: a Portable UI Framework for Mobile, Web, Embedded, and Desktop

#65

Post by aasasd »

s_y_n_t_a_x wrote: post #6
bradhoffman wrote: post #3

I’ve given Flutter a try with one of my client’s apps, and in some cases, it’s obviously better than native development. Mainly because you can develop for both platforms. I’d be curious to hear where other developers think Flutter is a good framework to use instead of developing native code.

On iOS it's obvious it uses emulated controls. I think if you want a fully themed app that looks the same across all environments, you should go with Flutter. If you want an app that looks the same as other native apps on the target environment, you should go with React Native.

Qt vs WxWidgets all over again.

Re: Flutter: a Portable UI Framework for Mobile, Web, Embedded, and Desktop

#66

Post by jjnoakes »

zackbrown wrote: post #26

Has Flutter solved its footprint-bloat problem? The internet is littered with reports of 10-100MB+ .ipa and .apk binaries coming out of simple Flutter apps for iOS + Android. Google states they can't imagine the footprint ever dropping as low as 1MB. [1] On Web, 1MB of base runtime is a complete showstopper. Embedded applications may suffer similarly. Does today's announcement mean Google has figured out how to fix t…

The sizes closer to 100MB seem to be from debug builds. From the bug you linked (and this one which it links to: https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/16833), bare flutter apps are around 4MB on Android.

Doesn't seem bad to me.

Re: Flutter: a Portable UI Framework for Mobile, Web, Embedded, and Desktop

#67

Post by mixmastamyk »

Hixie wrote: post #61
mixmastamyk wrote: post #51

Does the runtime work on Linux, i.e. Debian, Ubuntu, rather than ChromeOS?

(I'm the Flutter TL.) As a target platform or as a development platform? We don't support targeting Linux out of the box today, but we support Linux as a first-class development platform (it's what I use). That said, we do work on Linux, and if you're willing to do a bit of work, you can use it to write Linux apps. If you want to target X11, you'll need something like https://github.com/google/flutter-desktop-embeddi…

Interesting thanks. I'm looking to make something that can play media and animations would like it to run on beefy PCs as well as tablets if I can.

Re: Flutter: a Portable UI Framework for Mobile, Web, Embedded, and Desktop

#68

Post by mraleph »

jwiley wrote: post #38
zackbrown wrote: post #26

Has Flutter solved its footprint-bloat problem? The internet is littered with reports of 10-100MB+ .ipa and .apk binaries coming out of simple Flutter apps for iOS + Android. Google states they can't imagine the footprint ever dropping as low as 1MB. [1] On Web, 1MB of base runtime is a complete showstopper. Embedded applications may suffer similarly. Does today's announcement mean Google has figured out how to fix t…

'main.dart.js' in the example Flutter KENKEN app linked in the blog post: Chrome - 359kb Firefox - 990k I agree that Chrome is becoming more and more a proprietary channel for Google products, which is probably what its original intent was all along.

It's actually the very same main.dart.js (dart2js compiler does not have ability to target a specific browser, its output is supposed to work in every supported browser).

359kb is its compressed size, 990k is its uncompressed size.

Firefox shows compressed size in the "Transferred" column and uncompressed size in "Size" column.

In Chrome by default you see compressed size only, but if you click "Use large request rows" then you will see both compressed and uncompressed size.

Re: Flutter: a Portable UI Framework for Mobile, Web, Embedded, and Desktop

#69

Post by magicalist »

zackbrown wrote: post #26

Has Flutter solved its footprint-bloat problem? The internet is littered with reports of 10-100MB+ .ipa and .apk binaries coming out of simple Flutter apps for iOS + Android. Google states they can't imagine the footprint ever dropping as low as 1MB. [1] On Web, 1MB of base runtime is a complete showstopper. Embedded applications may suffer similarly. Does today's announcement mean Google has figured out how to fix t…

> This is possibly a very dark direction for the Web

Yes, that imagined dark direction for the web is indeed very dark.

Call it too big to ship reasonably, but Chrome didn't ship an Angular player or Polymer player, so I don't see what suggests they'd start now.

Re: Flutter: a Portable UI Framework for Mobile, Web, Embedded, and Desktop

#70

Post by mkozlows »

Hixie wrote: post #64
eitland wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying this isn't a web framework but rather a Chrome framework??

(I'm the Flutter TL.) We support targeting the Web (that's the tech preview we released today), and we support targeting Android, both of which ChromeOS support. We also support development on ChromeOS.

So there's not, as of now, a "native" (not using the Android emulation) Flutter API in ChromeOS?
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