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Flutter 3

docs.flutter.dev

211–220 of 453 posts

Re: Flutter 3

#211
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s wrong with using a single canvas? It can be faster. Google Docs and Figma, for example, use canvas rendering

I just checked and Google Docs is not a single canvas. It uses a canvas for the text but all the tools and so on are good old html.

Believe it’s a work in progress https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2021/05/Google-Docs-...

Re: Flutter 3

#212
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still maintain that Flutter Web is not production ready. It could have a nice niche, like games. But for real apps, it's just not as good as web. They are still re-implementing things that have existed in the web for ages, and are not going to be able to keep up. It's basically good for an applet style usage IMO. I'll keep trying it out, I think Flutter is pretty great for mobile, even desktop, but every time I use…

FWIW I kind of agree and I’m a big fan of both Flutter and the web in general. There are a couple of web platform technologies that I think are going to take Flutter web from ok to great in the next year or two including. WASM Garbage Collection is going to allow them to move from compiling to JS to WASM. They have already built a WASM compiler ready to go when it lands. WebGPU is another obvious one. Flutter is by d…

SEO is important for web apps, how do canvas based applications deal with that.

Re: Flutter 3

#214

Despite many maturity issues in practice Flutter is the only realistic option for true cross platform UIs that run everywhere. Apart from Qt , but the licensing issue is a hindrance. And yes, the web backend isn't ideal, but it will improve over time. I just wish Google had built Flutter on a low level core that isn't tied to Dart, so it would be usable from other languages. Dart isn't horrible and is getting better,…

"I just wish Google had built Flutter on a low level core that isn't tied to Dart, so it would be usable from other languages."

Exactly. Dart is a deal-breaker. I was tasked with choosing a cross-platform development solution, and rejected Flutter because nobody at my company (including me) knows Dart or has time to learn it. Nor would any contractors we were likely to find know it.

After quite a bit of research on other potential solutions, I determined (as did a crowded and lengthy thread in this forum) that Qt was the only viable one for now.

The recent proliferation of languages has been pretty annoying. Google should have at least used Kotlin. Alienating their own community of Android developers and making Flutter a pain in the ass to integrate into a development organization was dumb.

The other problem people cited with alleged cross-platform solutions is the need to write native code anyway if you need access to system/hardware resources (Bluetooth, USB, what have you).

Re: Flutter 3

#215
I was recently tasked to build a mobile app at my work, that would have maybe 5% of the feature-set of our gargantuan web product. However, this 5% was mission critical. Coming from React-TS, building with Flutter was a bit weird at first (where's my CSS???) but the productivity gains came quickly. The Pub ecosystem is fairly mature, in that all the third party packages are pretty high quality and address most common use cases. Unlike npm where there are 10+ solutions for the same problem, there will only be one - maybe 2 in Flutter land.

I was very pleased to find out, that Flutter supported web as well. Now, it's not as good as mobile yet - some of the animations are render blocked by the JS main thread - but it is a very nice 'middle' solution to somebody who needs to use the app who doesn't have iOS or Android (for example, Surface tablet). Also great for internal testing - push up the latest changes to a dev web environment, and everyone can test without installing APKs or using TestFlight.

In my use case, I was actively discouraged against making something that looked beautiful or pretty - the software is designed to be spartan, minimalist and essential. Flutter is perfect for that.

All in all, Flutter is awesome. Is it the right answer for everything? No. But when you only have one developer to spare whose job it is to build a mobile app, it's perfect for that. The web support is a nice bonus - haven't tried any of the desktop stuff yet.

Dart, as a language, is nice. Not spectacular, but certainly tidier than Java or JavaScript. I've gotten used to functionality programming, so writing everything in classes was jarring at first.

Re: Flutter 3

#216
post #11

I was hoping to see better HTML rendering. Using a single canvas to render web apps was my one turn off. Flutter is the right choice for many apps, but not for apps primarily accessed over the Web.

It is not production ready for web and I don't have much hope it ever will be. I love it for mobile, even desktop apps. But I feel they chose the wrong direction at the beginning for web and it's just trying to dig back out of that hole since then.

Couldn't they just embed Chrome, like Electron did?

Re: Flutter 3

#217
post #59

Despite many maturity issues in practice Flutter is the only realistic option for true cross platform UIs that run everywhere. Apart from Qt , but the licensing issue is a hindrance. And yes, the web backend isn't ideal, but it will improve over time. I just wish Google had built Flutter on a low level core that isn't tied to Dart, so it would be usable from other languages. Dart isn't horrible and is getting better,…

I keep hearing this, but none of the cross platform apps I run use Flutter. It's all Electron and Qt. I don't think I've ever seen Flutter in the wild.

> ever seen Flutter in the wild.

So what is this made in then? [0] Hint it is not Electron.

[0] https://rows.com/download

Re: Flutter 3

#218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ionic is pretty awful too, though I can't fault them. It's just that papering a web interface on top of a native app is gonna be a poor experience no matter what.

I don't think that's how Ionic developers would describe it today. Have you actually used it or Capacitor recently? The quality of apps being built on the platform has never been higher. (one random example: https://reflect.app )

For what it's worth I'm an Ionic developer and I find the grand-parent's description pretty accurate. I do like Capacitor though, but I think that's mostly because I've had to deal with Cordova before.

Re: Flutter 3

#219
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW I kind of agree and I’m a big fan of both Flutter and the web in general. There are a couple of web platform technologies that I think are going to take Flutter web from ok to great in the next year or two including. WASM Garbage Collection is going to allow them to move from compiling to JS to WASM. They have already built a WASM compiler ready to go when it lands. WebGPU is another obvious one. Flutter is by d…

SEO is important for web apps, how do canvas based applications deal with that.

SEO is important for websites which for the record you 100% should not use Flutter for.

Flutter is a great fit for applications which (and I say this as someone who did SEO for fortune 500s for many years) aren’t really all that relevant for SEO purposes and are difficult to index at best.

But the short answer to your question is the accessibility object model API is what gets used to surface relevant information that could be used by search engines along with all the other things that have nothing to do with the stuff that sits inside your body tags. Like it wouldn’t actually be that different IRL.

Re: Flutter 3

#220
post #25

I still can't find, in the docs, there is an open bug/feature request to NATIVELY copy/paste from web? Do they support copy / paste on the web app without using a special widget?

I'm not aware of any planned/possible way to do copy exactly as you would an HTML page with HTML tags, but there's a big project to make selection and copying much simpler and more powerful (design doc [1], in progress PR[2]). With that PR it should be easy to just add one SelectionArea to the root of your app in order to make everything selectable, like it would be on a web page. You don't need SelectableText widget…

Great initiative. Wondering why can't Google make this a priority and make it fast instead of focus on desktop and other device support.

Do they know that a ton of devs are not jumping in because of this one simple issue and sticking to other frameworks?

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