Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Flutter: UI platform designed for ambient computing

developers.googleblog.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 74 posts

Re: Flutter: UI platform designed for ambient computing

#11

Post by skybrian »

soneca wrote: post #5

Not sure if it is counter-intuitive, but I was deciding between React Native and Flutter for a project and this announcement nudged me to decide on React Native. I am pretty sure I just want my app to run on Android, iOS, and web. If Flutter's vision is making it possible to also design to TVs, smartwatches, thermostats, doorbells, fridges, etc it means that there will be trade-offs, added complexity, overhead, desig…

This seems a little odd, like refusing to use a programming language that's too portable. There are C libraries for various embedded devices you've never heard of, but you don't have to use them.

Flutter is targeting a lot of platforms. Part of this is that Google has a lot of hardware projects that need a UI, and the duplication from building a new UI stack each time was getting tedious.

But this doesn't mean that Flutter apps are doing the same. You can just target the platforms you want. It's not going to run anywhere else if you don't deploy it there.

Re: Flutter: UI platform designed for ambient computing

#12

Post by [deleted] »

soneca wrote: post #5

Not sure if it is counter-intuitive, but I was deciding between React Native and Flutter for a project and this announcement nudged me to decide on React Native. I am pretty sure I just want my app to run on Android, iOS, and web. If Flutter's vision is making it possible to also design to TVs, smartwatches, thermostats, doorbells, fridges, etc it means that there will be trade-offs, added complexity, overhead, desig…

[deleted]

Re: Flutter: UI platform designed for ambient computing

#13

Post by kd22 »

christocracy wrote: post #7
soneca wrote: post #5

Not sure if it is counter-intuitive, but I was deciding between React Native and Flutter for a project and this announcement nudged me to decide on React Native. I am pretty sure I just want my app to run on Android, iOS, and web. If Flutter's vision is making it possible to also design to TVs, smartwatches, thermostats, doorbells, fridges, etc it means that there will be trade-offs, added complexity, overhead, desig…

I’m a professional plugin developer. I make plugins for Cordova, React Native and Flutter. Flutter is my favorite. You should do a hello world at least.

Is building plugins faster/easier than building apps (using Flutter)? Looking to learn flutter so wondering if I should build a plugin or app when going beyond hello world.

Re: Flutter: UI platform designed for ambient computing

#14

Post by kyrra »

whytaka wrote: post #6

This is what I understood from all the hubbub around Fuchsia with Flutter powering the interfaces.

It's not called out in this blog post, but back at Google I/O earlier this year, they did say Fuchsia is powering the Nest Hub and Nest Hub Max. So those smart displays Google is making are Fuchsia + Flutter.

Re: Flutter: UI platform designed for ambient computing

#15

Post by losvedir »

Wow, talk about burying the lede. I'm not sure how I feel about Google's so-called "ambient computing" idea that they were all about at this year's Google I/O, but Flutter being championed for desktop and web are huge! Does this mean the end of Electron, finally? They say it runs on macOS, I hope they get to Windows and Linux soon.

I built a little Android/iOS app in Flutter and it was a real delight. I didn't especially like Dart at first, but it was easy enough to pick up and then got out of the way more or less. I'd love to be able to easily run an app like that on the web. I know Dart's original vision was to replace JS but it seems they backed off that a bit. But it sounds like it's back on the menu!

I don't know if this changes anything exactly, in terms of what Flutter can do right now. I think web/desktop have always sort of been there. But what's new for me is this perspective that they intend to support other devices beyond mobile. I wasn't really sure about that before, since it seemed mostly tailored to just iOS/Android when I was working with it.

Re: Flutter: UI platform designed for ambient computing

#16

Post by coldtea »

arkanciscan wrote: post #3

Scanned the whole article, still don't know what "ambient computing" is. I suppose they mean writing apps that run on the little microphones they want us to put all over our houses. Seems like I remember there being a platform that was built in the '90s to run on any device. What was it called..

>Scanned the whole article, still don't know what "ambient computing" is.

As TFA says:

"In this emerging world, the focus starts to move away from any individual device towards an environment where your services and software are available wherever you need them. We call this ambient computing".

In other words, going from devices as siloes you use one at a time, each with each own apps, accounts, data, and so on, into using a plethora of devices that play together, can run appropriate versions of the same apps, give you access to your data from wherever you are, switch your workflow from one to another, and so on.

So like multi-platform apps + cloud storage + what Apple calls "Handoff / Continuity" or MS calls "Timeline" + IoT...

Re: Flutter: UI platform designed for ambient computing

#17

Post by soneca »

coldtea wrote: post #10
soneca wrote: post #5

Not sure if it is counter-intuitive, but I was deciding between React Native and Flutter for a project and this announcement nudged me to decide on React Native. I am pretty sure I just want my app to run on Android, iOS, and web. If Flutter's vision is making it possible to also design to TVs, smartwatches, thermostats, doorbells, fridges, etc it means that there will be trade-offs, added complexity, overhead, desig…

This reads like someone who had already made their mind, and looked for anything to support their prior bias... For starters, who said RN is not having work done to run on "TVs, smartwatches, thermostats" and so on? Here's a post about work done for smart TVs from the official RN blog: https://facebook.github.io/react-native/docs/building-for-ap... Second, who said those concerns aren't orthogonal? Given a good modul…

Didn't know about the RN build for TV stuff, will do some research to check if they have the same vision. If they do, back to square one.

About your second point, I imagine it could be totally orthogonal. But I am especulating that it won't be. At some point there will be design decisions to be made around trade-offs and I'm sure Google's necessity to push "ambient computing" into the world will prevail over any modularity concerns.

Re: Flutter: UI platform designed for ambient computing

#18

Post by erokar »

arkanciscan wrote: post #3

Scanned the whole article, still don't know what "ambient computing" is. I suppose they mean writing apps that run on the little microphones they want us to put all over our houses. Seems like I remember there being a platform that was built in the '90s to run on any device. What was it called..

It's just a re-branding of run everywhere, i.e. they are trying to replace JavaScript.

Re: Flutter: UI platform designed for ambient computing

#19

Post by ZeroCool2u »

losvedir wrote: post #15

Wow, talk about burying the lede. I'm not sure how I feel about Google's so-called "ambient computing" idea that they were all about at this year's Google I/O, but Flutter being championed for desktop and web are huge! Does this mean the end of Electron, finally? They say it runs on macOS, I hope they get to Windows and Linux soon. I built a little Android/iOS app in Flutter and it was a real delight. I didn't especi…

Last year I was able to get a simple HN browser app running on both desktop Linux (Ubuntu) and Windows 10 as well. They weren't perfect, but I'm certain support is even better now.

Re: Flutter: UI platform designed for ambient computing

#20

Post by erokar »

What are people's impression of Dart as a language, compared to e.g. Typescript? Reviews so far seems lackluster. Does Dart have anything that sets it apart from JS, like immutable data structures out of the box? How's the support for functional programming, e.g. first order functions, closures, higher order functions like map, filter, reduce, etc?

How advanced is the typing system, are we talking Java level or significantly more powerful?

Post reply on HN