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Skip is now free and open source

skip.dev

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Re: Skip is now free and open source

#101

Post by SoKamil »

winrid wrote: post #46
skavi wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dunno about Skip, but I can always tell when an app is Flutter. They feel like crap. Everything's a bit off with the native looking widgets. And fully custom designs still animate a bit weirdly. And they definitely still stutter. Somehow a tier below React Native.

Flutter re-generates the entire layout every tick and diffs it (immediate-mode), like a game engine. If your device isn't quite fast enough it'll lag, yep. RN is retained mode (but written in immediate-mode style and the diffing only happens when it has to).

Interesting, I didn’t know that it was immediate mode. According to the article [1] though, it now uses rendering engine with Retained Mode due to performance issues.

[1] https://medium.com/@0s.and.1s/flutter-part-iv-skia-vs-impell...

Re: Skip is now free and open source

#102

Post by aembleton »

OkayPhysicist wrote: post #91
nsm wrote: post #70

> The plain truth is that developers expect to get their tools free of charge. This is an accurate, but damning indictment of how some of the most highly paid workers on the planet won't pay for tools. Unlike nearly every other profession. Folks, if you can afford it, please pay for quality software, instead of relying on FAANG and VC money to keep the tools going!

The highest quality tools in the software development space tend to be FOSS, because unlike any other field, we are employed in the field that makes the tools our field uses, and distribution and manufacturing costs are zero. People build tools that they want to use, then share it with others because it's free to. If the rest of the economy worked like this we would be in full-blown utopia. Selling software to softwa…

> you're always going to be competing with "I could build this myself"

Even more so these days with agentic coding

Re: Skip is now free and open source

#103

Post by NamlchakKhandro »

OkayPhysicist wrote: post #91
nsm wrote: post #70

> The plain truth is that developers expect to get their tools free of charge. This is an accurate, but damning indictment of how some of the most highly paid workers on the planet won't pay for tools. Unlike nearly every other profession. Folks, if you can afford it, please pay for quality software, instead of relying on FAANG and VC money to keep the tools going!

The highest quality tools in the software development space tend to be FOSS, because unlike any other field, we are employed in the field that makes the tools our field uses, and distribution and manufacturing costs are zero. People build tools that they want to use, then share it with others because it's free to. If the rest of the economy worked like this we would be in full-blown utopia. Selling software to softwa…

> distribution and manufacturing costs are zero.

???? citation needed

Re: Skip is now free and open source

#104

Post by al_borland »

nsm wrote: post #70

> The plain truth is that developers expect to get their tools free of charge. This is an accurate, but damning indictment of how some of the most highly paid workers on the planet won't pay for tools. Unlike nearly every other profession. Folks, if you can afford it, please pay for quality software, instead of relying on FAANG and VC money to keep the tools going!

I’ve paid for a few things for work, but I’m always living a bit outside of corporate rules when I do that. This makes it hard for me to justify if it’s only for work. In other cases, the licensing of the product doesn’t allow me to bring my personal license to work.

I’ve paid for 2 text editors, that I used personally, but also took it to work. Now I use VS Code, because the company essentially mandated it with the way they rolled out GitHub Copilot and wanted to see metrics on it. This pushed me to VSCodium at home, so I don’t have to live 2 different worlds.

I paid for the font I use in my editor, I assume that’s not something that will get flagged.

Transmit (from Panic) and Kagi are the other two things I’m using at work with my personal account. I keep waiting for them to randomly stop working one day.

Getting an actual license for software through work, that isn’t already approved, requires so much bureaucracy and red tape; I don’t even know where to begin.

I sometimes daydream about working for myself or a small company, where I can use whatever I want.

Re: Skip is now free and open source

#105

Post by tekne »

NamlchakKhandro wrote: post #103
OkayPhysicist wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The highest quality tools in the software development space tend to be FOSS, because unlike any other field, we are employed in the field that makes the tools our field uses, and distribution and manufacturing costs are zero. People build tools that they want to use, then share it with others because it's free to. If the rest of the economy worked like this we would be in full-blown utopia. Selling software to softwa…

> distribution and manufacturing costs are zero. ???? citation needed

Once the software is written, it is ~free to copy. People pay a lot of money to avoid the software getting copied... and it gets copied anyways.

Re: Skip is now free and open source

#106

Post by anonymous908213 »

OkayPhysicist wrote: post #91
nsm wrote: post #70

> The plain truth is that developers expect to get their tools free of charge. This is an accurate, but damning indictment of how some of the most highly paid workers on the planet won't pay for tools. Unlike nearly every other profession. Folks, if you can afford it, please pay for quality software, instead of relying on FAANG and VC money to keep the tools going!

The highest quality tools in the software development space tend to be FOSS, because unlike any other field, we are employed in the field that makes the tools our field uses, and distribution and manufacturing costs are zero. People build tools that they want to use, then share it with others because it's free to. If the rest of the economy worked like this we would be in full-blown utopia. Selling software to softwa…

> The highest quality tools in the software development space tend to be FOSS

> People build tools that they want to use, then share it with others because it's free to

This maybe sounds true on the surface, but isn't really? Prior to VSCode, Visual Studio was the most-used editor by professional developers for a very long time, with Sublime Text and Jetbrains' IDEs being close behind, and the paid options are still among the most popular. While VSCode is wildly successful, and has completely unprecedented adoption rates, it was not borne out of people "building tools because they want to, then sharing it because it's free", but is rather the result of Microsoft's calculated gamble that open-source would give them more ecosystem capture and useful data through telemetry in the long run.

> Selling software to software developers is always going to have a pretty low ceiling, because you're always going to be competing with "I could build this myself"

This shouldn't really be true if software developers would think rationally about tools for three seconds. I believe the US median compensation for developers is approaching $200k? Any tool that saves a single hour of productivity is likely paying for itself, maybe two or three for the more expensive ones. Something that saves 40 hours of productivity is basically worth its weight in gold. You might be able to say "I can build this myself", but can you build it yourself in 1 hour? 40 hours? For most software, it would still take even longer than that. If you are a paid professional, and value your own time anywhere near what your employer does (I personally value my time more than any employer ever did), you should be extremely grateful for any opportunity to spend trivial sums of money in a way that allows you to reclaim hours to use in other ways.

Re: Skip is now free and open source

#107

Post by NamlchakKhandro »

ppeetteerr wrote: post #97
nsm wrote: post #70

> The plain truth is that developers expect to get their tools free of charge. This is an accurate, but damning indictment of how some of the most highly paid workers on the planet won't pay for tools. Unlike nearly every other profession. Folks, if you can afford it, please pay for quality software, instead of relying on FAANG and VC money to keep the tools going!

Engineers are happy to pay for tools (hello, Claude Code). Libraries are quite different and it's a little uncomfortable to build a business on a closed-source, proprietary library.

No one pays for Claude Code, they pay a subscription to access the Claude Models.

lmao who even unironcally uses claude code when other harnesses exist that eclipse them ?

Re: Skip is now free and open source

#108

Post by NamlchakKhandro »

holoduke wrote: post #88
marcprux wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See my response below on the KMP question: the comparison with CMP mostly applies to Flutter as well. > near-native mobile apps (the difference is almost negligible) Not as of the advent of Liquid Glass on iOS (and, to a lesser extent, Material Expressive on Android). Flutter isn't going to be implementing these new interface conventions[1], and so the UI for these apps are stuck on the last generation and are alread…

Well sorry. But Android UI is bad just bad. The settings, the menus. Its bloated and almost as if they deliberately made it annoying to use. It just sucks.

[flagged]

Re: Skip is now free and open source

#109

Post by RobotToaster »

nsm wrote: post #70

> The plain truth is that developers expect to get their tools free of charge. This is an accurate, but damning indictment of how some of the most highly paid workers on the planet won't pay for tools. Unlike nearly every other profession. Folks, if you can afford it, please pay for quality software, instead of relying on FAANG and VC money to keep the tools going!

In most lines of work it's standard for the employer to pay for tools, not the worker. If anyone is cheap it's the capitalist bosses.

Re: Skip is now free and open source

#110

Post by realusername »

winrid wrote: post #46
skavi wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dunno about Skip, but I can always tell when an app is Flutter. They feel like crap. Everything's a bit off with the native looking widgets. And fully custom designs still animate a bit weirdly. And they definitely still stutter. Somehow a tier below React Native.

Flutter re-generates the entire layout every tick and diffs it (immediate-mode), like a game engine. If your device isn't quite fast enough it'll lag, yep. RN is retained mode (but written in immediate-mode style and the diffing only happens when it has to).

I'd say it's the opposite, on crappy devices, Flutter feels faster than native, not sure how but that's the end result. I've been testing on an old Samsung J3 and it's definitely better than native.

That's also maybe why it's so popular in India.

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