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Flutter 2

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Re: Flutter 2

#231

Post by ignoramous »

eseidelGoogle wrote: post #155
rp1229 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The new Google Pay app on iOS is incredibly sluggish -- animations stutter, switching pages has hesitations. I'm not sure what they mean by "quality" in this case.

[Flutter Eng. Dir here] We were also not satisfied with the performance of the initial GPay release. We've been working with the GPay team the last couple months and have made significant improvements within both Flutter and the GPay app. Hopefully the next release of GPay will be out soon and others will be able to see the progress we're continuing to make with the team.

Thanks.

Not related to Flutter but Google in general: I recently hit a hard-to-reproduce bug with Jetpack's LiveData for which there's already an open issue created by a third-party developer. I don't recall but it had been open since 2018 with no updates whatsoever from Google engineers on its progress.

And therein lies a frustrating problem for engineers not working at Google but using Google tech. There is simply no alternate universe where a third-party team gets the level of access the way you described the Google Pay team did.

Of course, it helps that the stakeholders are in the same company, but my point is, shouldn't there be a Flutter Foundation where every developer can feel at home on equal footing with other Googlers? Flutter is so promising, and yet, at the same time, I don't want to end up being slave to its complexities with no way out as a third-party small development shop.

Despite that, I'm 99% porting my cross-platform app to Flutter after strong reviews from other developers I know.

Re: Flutter 2

#232

Post by adam12 »

randomchars wrote: post #35

The idea sounds very appealing, especially to an indie developer: being able to ship your app on multiple platforms from a single codebase is kind of the holy grail. Unfortunately, the result is.... I tested this Flutter example[1], on a 16" MBP with and i7, and it is janky as it can get, it feels like I'm using a 15 year old computer. From the code it looks like the whole thing is... rendered on canvas? I'll pass. […

No jank in Firefox. It does take 10 scrolls to move 6 inches, though.

Re: Flutter 2

#233

Post by oblio »

pier25 wrote: post #178
lostmsu wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flutter does not offer enough to justify learning new programming language.

Dart is extremely easy to pick up if you've written in any C style language. Someone in our team had a small Android TV app working in 2-3 days with WebSockets, web views, some animations, etc.

Syntax, semantics, code organization and best practices, libraries, frameworks, debugging and debuggers, IDE support (preferably multiple IDEs for multiple platforms), LSP support, linters, profilers, disassemblers, dependency license checkers, dependency vulnerability scanners, package managers, package repository with support for private repos and proxying/mirroring, should I go on and on and on?

Your toy app takes 2 days to create and then you (or worse, someone else) have to support the crummy Visual Basic/PHP/Javascript/Mongo/ColdFusion/insert easy to use crappy tech here, forever.

Re: Flutter 2

#234

Post by dimator »

fastball wrote: post #185
jasonvorhe wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not clear what you're arguing for or against. Google Pay is a product with multiple features and one of them is being phased out. What's that to do with the benefits they're claiming from the rewrite of the mobile app?

Let me try: > Flutter 2 supports web now! > We've re-written GPay in Flutter 2! > We're dropping support for using GPay on the web...

That doesn't follow. There's any number of reasons the web app would be shut down, usage statistics being the most likely.

Re: Flutter 2

#235

Post by andrewstuart »

When a company releases a new technology for building desktop applications, the primary thing I look for is a really solid fleshed out implementation of a CRUD application:

- sign in to some back end

- create and edit data using forms

- browse data in some sort of datatable/datagrid

- use ajax to GET and POST data

But such a demo is pretty much never there - I certainly can't see it in this case. But surely the vast majority of ordinary desktop applications people need to build are just this ... CRUD with auth, ajax and data browsing.

It would be dramatically easier to give a new technology for desktop applications a try if such a demo was provided.

Re: Flutter 2

#236

Post by randomchars »

etaioinshrdlu wrote: post #96
randomchars wrote: post #35

The idea sounds very appealing, especially to an indie developer: being able to ship your app on multiple platforms from a single codebase is kind of the holy grail. Unfortunately, the result is.... I tested this Flutter example[1], on a 16" MBP with and i7, and it is janky as it can get, it feels like I'm using a 15 year old computer. From the code it looks like the whole thing is... rendered on canvas? I'll pass. […

I think this particular demo might also just be a badly designed demo.

Well, this was the most prominently featured demo. Is there a demo somewhere that's not badly designed?

Re: Flutter 2

#237

Post by capableweb »

yjbanov wrote: post #149
capableweb wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can't reproduce these issues now dstaley just said that those issues happen now. " I just tried a few samples, and ..." I just tried the demos over at https://flutter.github.io/samples/#?platform=web and I concur, Flutter is utterly horrible for everything the web stands for. So not amazing and seems to actively make everything worse.

(disclaimer: I work on the Flutter team) We certainly don't think Flutter should replace HTML or other frameworks. We hope Flutter will work well for many use-cases, but the web is huge. There's room for multiple approaches. If it's not working for your use-case it's totally fine with us if you use something else. We welcome constructive feedback on what's not working so we know where to focus our efforts.

Thanks! A great first step would be to have a "web-native" renderer for your web version. Meaning that it'll use DOM elements that the browser to handle the rendering of. Would fix many of the current issues with your implementation.

Re: Flutter 2

#238

Post by timsneath »

agersant wrote: post #138

As a hobbyist Flutter user, I would like to be excited for this release. However, this announcement page does not do a very good job at highlighting changes and new features from Flutter 1. The only concrete feature mentioned is the web platform being stable. Everything else is old news or plugging random companies. The changelog ( https://flutter.dev/docs/development/tools/sdk/release-notes... ) looks like a dump of…

You're right! This isn't an exhaustive listing of the features in Flutter 2 or changes since Flutter 1.12 (which was our last stable release). For that, there's a separate article: https://medium.com/flutter/whats-new-in-flutter-2-0-fe8e95ec...

Re: Flutter 2

#239

Post by ledak »

mdoms wrote: post #197
yagodragon wrote: post #112

We're all complaining about how js is a bad language, tooling is a mess, and how the web is fundamentally built for documents and makes it hard to create app-like experiences. Now, Google comes and creates a whole new UI toolkit from scratch, couples it with a very beautiful SDK and component framework and offers a far better programming language than js could ever be but we're still nagging. I was also pretty disapp…

I just visited flutterfolio.com. The very first thing I tried to do is enter a username and Tab to the password field. But Tab just catapulted my input focus to the browser address bar. I mean, come on.

It strongly reminds of mid-2000s sites written in Flash

Re: Flutter 2

#240

Post by ClawsOnPaws »

mdoms wrote: post #197
yagodragon wrote: post #112

We're all complaining about how js is a bad language, tooling is a mess, and how the web is fundamentally built for documents and makes it hard to create app-like experiences. Now, Google comes and creates a whole new UI toolkit from scratch, couples it with a very beautiful SDK and component framework and offers a far better programming language than js could ever be but we're still nagging. I was also pretty disapp…

I just visited flutterfolio.com. The very first thing I tried to do is enter a username and Tab to the password field. But Tab just catapulted my input focus to the browser address bar. I mean, come on.

I know I do almost nothing on HN but complain about accessibility, but it's really important to me because, well, that's how I uze my tech. And so far, sadly, Flutter hasn't impressed either with its previous versions. Edit boxes in particular were a major pain point, and things like you're describing were also less than optimal. I never knew where the focus was and what it was doing. With broken markup there was at least ways around it. But I'm scared of things that render on the canvas. Most browsers actually get this right and have support for these things that don't require ugly hacks if you use the DOM. And there is no real way to interface with assistive tech from JavaScript except through it. So you have to somehow still actually represent your apps UI in the Dom in some way.
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