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Flutter 3

docs.flutter.dev

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Re: Flutter 3

#401

Post by SemanticStrengh »

danielvaughn wrote: post #398
mhoad wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to have a lot of very strongly held opinions in this thread that aren’t backed up by any evidence other than your personal opinion. It’s clear that Flutter wasn’t for you for whatever reason and you seem to love Iconic which is great but obsessively hanging out on this thread and just trying to shit all over it at every opportunity you get without citing any evidence is weird. Just go an enjoy Iconic. I don’…

Someone else told him he should disclose that he works for Ionic and he’s claiming that he doesn’t work there. I don’t buy it, because the CEO of Ionic himself responded to me in this thread with some equally dismissive comments. Really weird behavior and it makes the Ionic team look super thin-skinned.

No, the ionic CEO yesimahunan often comment on HN and give generally neutral statements.

I am sick of people ignorance in GUI rendering engines and the religious myths they build over native, so I actively comment too because online GUI conversations are still on a middle age like era. If I wzs tied to Ionic I would try to please people, which I don't. In fact Ionic communication has often self victimized itself by corroborating the native rendering myth in lany of their blogs. The internet and HN indeed is a small place and seeing the Ionic CEO and one of the only person with expertise in 2D GUI renderers (me) on thr flutter 3.0 announcement is actually, not unlikely. But it surprises because on average on the internet, people don't care to push depth/accuracy into discussions.

BTW I am capable of pointing flaws in Ionic, the documentation on the web is often not up to date, and inn general I would much prefer a Kotlin based GUI framework (such as jetpack compose) over a JS framework (ionic). I am in fact the only person on HN to have an actual argument to defend a true Ionic competitor, based either on fastuidraw, piet-gpu or gecko but there's no point in discussing this given no one could contribute to the discussion.

Re: Flutter 3

#402

Post by rkangel »

samwillis wrote: post #109
the_duke wrote: post #42

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,…

> Flutter is the only realistic option for true cross platform UIs that run everywhere. I understand that argument but 100% disagree. The web is the cross platform that runs everywhere (as in in a browser or webview). True it has many issues and some forms of it (electron) are not ideal for some use case but I believe it’s a better platform than flutter in almost every way. You say “true” cross platform and could arg…

> The web is the cross platform that runs everywhere (as in in a browser or webview)

Yes, but the web is crappy system for designing UIs in.

As a community we've got good at designing UIs with web technologies (HTML+CSS), because we have no other choice if you want to build web-apps. But the level of experience we've gained with those tools has hidden the fact that they have some real issues - mostly due to the fact that they've developed piecemeal over many years. Getting the layout of your page to behave correctly under all the circumstances it needs to requires a lot of experience with CSS, a lot of simple page behaviour we'd now expect as users require adding JS sprinkled around (and I'm not talking app logic, just UI logic).

I freely admit that I'm not great with CSS - I'm not a web developer although I have done some web development. If I do any at work (e.g. web UI for embedded device) I need a pro to come along and make things look nice. But when I did app development in Flutter it took about 2 days to be able to build screens that looked good, did complicated dynamic behaviour, and behaved reliably regardless of screen size and shape.

Re: Flutter 3

#403

Post by topogios »

jbigelow76 wrote: post #266
rvz wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ever seen Flutter in the wild. So what is this made in then? [0] Hint it is not Electron. [0] https://rows.com/download

Xamarin?

The referenced "Rows" application seems to be the showcase app "Rows" listed at

https://flutter.dev/showcase

Re: Flutter 3

#404

Post by criddell »

mhoad wrote: post #364
criddell wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who is “we”? As a user I want highly polished, efficient apps. That pretty much rules out anything built with a cross platform toolkit. (Games are a major exception.) As a developer, I personally want to make those kinds of programs too. I periodically check into the state of the cross platform toolkits and frankly they really aren’t any better than they were a decade ago. Separating out a UI layer that is unique in…

I think this assumption that cross platform UI solutions can’t be extremely fast is a very strange one. There have been some bad efforts at this in the past which is maybe how you arrived at the conclusion but the concept of Flutter is pretty straightforward and not dissimilar to games in some sense where you just need to push pixels to a screen. They even have a some game engineers who used to work at EA on the team…

They can be fast, but a well written browser based solution will usually be slower, use more memory and CPU than a well written native app.

Of the toolkits I’ve looked into (which admittedly are mostly on the desktop), Qt is probably the best on that front.

Re: Flutter 3

#406

Post by danielvaughn »

SemanticStrengh wrote: post #401
danielvaughn wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone else told him he should disclose that he works for Ionic and he’s claiming that he doesn’t work there. I don’t buy it, because the CEO of Ionic himself responded to me in this thread with some equally dismissive comments. Really weird behavior and it makes the Ionic team look super thin-skinned.

No, the ionic CEO yesimahunan often comment on HN and give generally neutral statements. I am sick of people ignorance in GUI rendering engines and the religious myths they build over native, so I actively comment too because online GUI conversations are still on a middle age like era. If I wzs tied to Ionic I would try to please people, which I don't. In fact Ionic communication has often self victimized itself by c…

fwiw I totally agree with your other comment on the insanity of CanvasKit. I'm just digging into low-level rendering myself, and immediately thought...wait, so you're writing in Skia, only to be compiled into WASM, feeding into a 2D canvas context, which is rendered by...Skia? tf?

Re: Flutter 3

#407

Post by jcelerier »

qalmakka wrote: post #394
NonNefarious wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it not a problem if you want to sell closed-source software? I guess you can dynamically link desktop applications (although I'm not sure how this works in Apple's Mac app store), but you can't do that with mobile apps.

I have never seen anyone statically linking Qt anywhere, even with a commercial license. The main issue is iOS, where it's basically impossible to ship anything (L)GPLv3 on the app store, but that's due to Apple's lock-in policies. Also, JNI requires you to use DLLs/shared objects, so you definitely can use them on Android.

> I have never seen anyone statically linking Qt anywhere, even with a commercial license.

from a quick grep on my hard drive, Telegram and QBittorrent statically link against Qt on Windows ; my own software also does, on all platforms. I assume there are others.

Re: Flutter 3

#408

Post by wildrhythms »

dmitriid wrote: post #28
simulate-me wrote: post #15

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

> What’s wrong with using a single canvas You can't even select and copy text. And canvas is inaccessible to screen readers

FYI there is a SelectableText widget included in Flutter[1] but the developer has to explicitly make text selectable just like iOS and just like Android apps. Desktop is a different story... many text selection paradigms that I'm familiar with on desktop (like double-click and hold and drag to select whole words) simply don't work right. It's not a great experience, but neither is the vast majority of non-Flutter mobile apps when it comes to selecting text too.

wrt accessibility, Flutter does actually generate elements with aria attributes for screenreaders to consume[2]. You're right that the canvas is inaccessible, which is why the aria labels have to be generated adjacent to that.

We're using Flutter for mobile development at my workplace.

[1] https://api.flutter.dev/flutter/material/SelectableText-clas... [2] https://docs.flutter.dev/development/accessibility-and-local...

Re: Flutter 3

#409

Post by deergomoo »

bschwindHN wrote: post #245

People are talking about a better developer experience, but hardly anyone is talking about the user experience with apps built with this tech. I don't feel it's great, especially on older devices. Take google pay, a showcase flutter app. It's a laggy mess on an iPhone SE 2016, whereas the "old" google pay ran perfectly fine. On top of that, many google apps I use these days will just freeze and stop accepting touch i…

I find Google’s iOS apps to be thoroughly mediocre and frustrating to use, whether they’re Flutter or not. They just don’t behave like iOS apps.

It’s even worse when you’re in a less common set up, like using an iPad with a keyboard case. I can’t even use the arrow keys to move between search results in the YouTube app.

I know most people don’t care, but it’s the endless little details that make me thoroughly dislike cross-platform toolkits.

Re: Flutter 3

#410

Post by aa-jv »

the_duke wrote: post #42

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,…

> realistic option for true cross platform UIs that run everywhere

I switched from Flutter to JUCE and haven't looked back. Its a far better user experience, and a far better developer experience too.

People often overlook it, because its pitched as a framework for Audio developers, but the work to make a truly operational cross-platform GUI has pushed it into 'suitable for normal application' territory, imho.

Anyone looking to solve the platform issue would be very wise to do a few workbench sessions with JUCE, and to a lesser degree, the Godot gaming framework as well. These are perfectly cromulant ways to build high-performance, cross platform, accessible applications...

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