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Flutter looks good, but is painful

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Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful

#161

Post by hitekker »

saagarjha wrote: post #153
nnq wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Coherent UI is a very important point to users Nah, it ain't. At all! I used to believe it did. That's what we geeks think. And on mobile it doesn't matters for us either - keybings working consistently doesn't matter you're only using touch... Same thing with React Native, everyone thought it's awesome because native UI controls. But users never care about that. For touch UIs it's more user friendly to have you ap…

> People say they care about "coherence" or "consistency" when they are too clueless to figure out what's actually broken about their UIs, so they assume this is the issue. I see developers push for non-native UI all the time because they think their users are too stupid to tell the difference. They're not.

I've often encountered this sentiment as a rationalization: these developers know their product looks and feels inferior, but they've already invested (their egos) in the "amazing" and "magical" . Eventually, the consequences of prioritizing their comfort over their customers emerge, and the developers either defend their tools to the death or slink away to the next "slick" solution.

Wash, rinse, repeat.

Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful

#162

Post by nnq »

saagarjha wrote: post #153
nnq wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Coherent UI is a very important point to users Nah, it ain't. At all! I used to believe it did. That's what we geeks think. And on mobile it doesn't matters for us either - keybings working consistently doesn't matter you're only using touch... Same thing with React Native, everyone thought it's awesome because native UI controls. But users never care about that. For touch UIs it's more user friendly to have you ap…

> People say they care about "coherence" or "consistency" when they are too clueless to figure out what's actually broken about their UIs, so they assume this is the issue. I see developers push for non-native UI all the time because they think their users are too stupid to tell the difference. They're not.

I guess you're right. Users do tell the difference! But they usually tell the difference between laggy (even 100ms IS noticeable!) and janky UI vs. snappy & smooth UI. It's not about the graphic styles and font widths and such. It's about being fast even on overloaded cheap devices in power saving mode, and don't doing anything too weird or non-sensical.

TBH I'm not sure Flutter can be fast and smooth enough for all... the market is full of crappy devices and even the good ones perform badly when their RAM is maxed out and CPU throttled bc of battery saving.

Maybe full native is the way to go. But not because of "perfect" shadows and font widths... Users care about consistency of stile inside one app, not app-style vs. system-style.

Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful

#163

Post by russellbeattie »

pcr910303 wrote: post #17

While this has little relationship to the original article... We really should be trying to use the native GUI toolkit (or cross-platform native UI libraries like libui), not using Flutter-esque libraries that draws everything from scratch. Coherent UI is a very important point to users IMO. Users can assume that some special feature from App X will also work on App Y. For example, in macOS Cocoa, textboxes have univ…

Add to this Accessibility: Standard widgets normally have accessibility features built in, working well and tested to make sure apps work correctly with various assistive technologies like screen readers, zooming, key controls, etc.

Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful

#164

Post by cjaybo »

nnq wrote: post #162
saagarjha wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People say they care about "coherence" or "consistency" when they are too clueless to figure out what's actually broken about their UIs, so they assume this is the issue. I see developers push for non-native UI all the time because they think their users are too stupid to tell the difference. They're not.

I guess you're right. Users do tell the difference! But they usually tell the difference between laggy (even 100ms IS noticeable!) and janky UI vs. snappy & smooth UI . It's not about the graphic styles and font widths and such. It's about being fast even on overloaded cheap devices in power saving mode, and don't doing anything too weird or non-sensical. TBH I'm not sure Flutter can be fast and smooth enough for all…

> Users care about consistency of stile inside one app, not app-style vs. system-style.

Do you have a source for this claim? This conflicts with the results of some UX studies I've seen.

Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful

#165

Post by nicoburns »

vbsteven wrote: post #73
nicoburns wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm hoping a cross-platform UI takes over the world. Then it will be the "native" UI's that seem inconsistent.

In a sense that already happened with the web stack. In tech like Electron developers write most of their app once and use a “shell” like Electron to interact with the host OS. Unfortunately the web stack is very bloated with years of legacy and this requires these shell projects to embed a full browser engine making these apps bloated as well. Flutter is an approach at making a new shell that provides rendering and…

Ah yes. I should have specified: a high-performance, low resource usage cross-platform UI. Flutter's a nice idea, but I somewhat suspect it will never make it out of its relatively small niche. I have my eye on the Rust UI work. It's a long way out, but it has the potential to be a really solid foundation for a universal UI platform.

Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful

#166

Post by pjmlp »

krzat wrote: post #137
piokoch wrote: post #131

The question is: if Flutter will not get traction that Google expects, what will happen with the project? The space of multi-platform mobile apps toolkit is already occupied by several well established players (React Native, Qt, Xamarin and a dozen of other more or less popular tools, sometimes well entrenched in their niches, like Unity for games). Flutter comes with rather obscure language and is late in the game,…

The strength of Flutter is it's architecture. Nothing comes close. Web is too slow. Xamarin/React Native is too restricted by native layer. Qt is C++. Popularity of Flutter increases steadily: https://trends.google.pl/trends/explore?cat=31&date=today%20...

Yeah right, as if Common Lisp and Smalltalk, or the myriad of 90's 4GLs never happened.

Popularity does not translate in money nor projects, specially with a niche language designed for doing UIs only, lacking libraries left and right.

Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful

#167

Post by jeieo029 »

rkangel wrote: post #127
dgellow wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends what you mean by “re-writing the same app”. In general you can have the core features written in C++, thus available everywhere, then write a platform specific layer on top of this. That’s a quite common approach, and if done correctly (that’s not a trivial task though) allow you to target any platform without too much effort. But yes, you still have to maintain a bunch of stuff for each platform: - implem…

The expectation level for UIs on mobile devices has been set very high. There is a lot of detail to get right in order to deliver the experience that people expect. That UI specific work is very time consuming. It doesn't really matter what else is going on in your app, if that work can be done more efficiently to produce a more consistent result, then that's the decision you make.

That reads a bit like “we know what people expect from a UI but it’s hard.”

If we know so much about what they expect, why is it still hard?

I wonder if all the trend chasing is really just making busy work and getting in the way of truly standardized and dumb simple building of software.

Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful

#168

Post by Isomorpheus »

nicoburns wrote: post #165
vbsteven wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a sense that already happened with the web stack. In tech like Electron developers write most of their app once and use a “shell” like Electron to interact with the host OS. Unfortunately the web stack is very bloated with years of legacy and this requires these shell projects to embed a full browser engine making these apps bloated as well. Flutter is an approach at making a new shell that provides rendering and…

Ah yes. I should have specified: a high-performance, low resource usage cross-platform UI. Flutter's a nice idea, but I somewhat suspect it will never make it out of its relatively small niche. I have my eye on the Rust UI work. It's a long way out, but it has the potential to be a really solid foundation for a universal UI platform.

Don't forget Revery!

https://github.com/revery-ui/revery

Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful

#169

Post by jazoom »

turrini wrote: post #126
jazoom wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Adding Flutter or any other UI library that draws everything from scratch is a bad idea. Some would say re-writing the same app 5 times (Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android) and maintaining 5 codebases is a bad idea.

Not true. I'm working with C++/Qt/QML/Javascript. No need to maintain 5 codebases. Just a single codebase compiles to at least 9 platforms: Linux, Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, *BSD, Raspberry, QNX and WebAssembly.

> Not true

What's not true? You just agreed with my statement. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful

#170

Post by telotortium »

cjaybo wrote: post #164
nnq wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess you're right. Users do tell the difference! But they usually tell the difference between laggy (even 100ms IS noticeable!) and janky UI vs. snappy & smooth UI . It's not about the graphic styles and font widths and such. It's about being fast even on overloaded cheap devices in power saving mode, and don't doing anything too weird or non-sensical. TBH I'm not sure Flutter can be fast and smooth enough for all…

> Users care about consistency of stile inside one app, not app-style vs. system-style. Do you have a source for this claim? This conflicts with the results of some UX studies I've seen.

What studies have you seen?
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