Is “one week of electric scooter rental in Bucharest” the new world currency?
If it is, be careful. It's scary riding electric scooters (or bikes) in Bucharest! :-)
Flutter looks good, but is painful
31–40 of 191 posts
Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful
#32While 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…
> Windows apps usually just re-invent all kinds of UI elements It wasn't always this way. Before Win8, most apps used native controls on Windows. When it became apparent GPU rendering is the way forward, MS re-implemented them in WPF. It does draw everything from scratch, because the backend is now DirectX 9. But it was a first party reimplementation, the UX is good. Then came Windows 8 and Windows 10, trying to conv…
> Before Win8, most apps used native controls on Windows.
Yeah, it's true but the problem is that the native controls were very limited. There was no central notification system so every Windows messaging app reinvented notifications(unlike macOS which converged to Growl and later, the Notification Center), no standard Ribbon Menu widget (at least when it was first introduced, I'm not sure about the current status) so everyone reinvented it, e.g.
> Then came Windows 8 and Windows 10, trying to converge PCs and phones. They screw up the UX.
This is so true... Windows 8/10 has a such mixed up UX that some system components are using the new 'metro' style while some others are old Win32 ones that don't support HiDPI... And, (while currently not true) Windows 10 had two settings app that worked differently for a few years. :-(
Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful
#33While 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…
>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.
It’s great that there are a lot of cross platform solutions today. On the other hand it’s also the reason why we put up with shit apps like Slack’s desktop and mobile clients.
As a macOS and iOS user I’m sad because both platforms have a far superior native UI, but at the same time as a developer I’m glad I can quickly build things for multiple platforms because there is no way my customers would pay for separate native implementations.
Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful
#34For those who are looking for an alternative to Flutter/React Native, please check out Nativescript @ https://docs.nativescript.org ! It's different in a few key ways: - Draws native components (Flutter draws every pixel) - Pure JS native (i.e. JNI powered) shim layer (you can write stuff like `const intent = new Intent()`) - Typescript as first-class (not quite so with React Native, and IMO Typescript > Dart as far…
Looks interesting, but from the homepage I had absolutely no idea this had anything to do with apps. What would be a good place to start?
Sorry maybe the homepage is better to start on (I linked to the docs page):
Here's a talk from 2 years ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELemwZXJZVg
I personally prefer Nativescript-Vue and I find their docs to be very good:
https://nativescript-vue.org/en/docs/introduction
Some more video resources:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcCSq2Y9bow
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qR1ESQTALI0
I personally think the best way to learn it is to get your hands dirty and use it to build something, so I'd recommend that, but there are certainly resources out there as well.
Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful
#35I have a couple of android app PoCs in mind but didn't want to go down the Android SDK way which IMO is becoming more and more complicated and verbose with every release. Just tried Flutter and React-Native yesterday for the first time, and I'm sorry to say both were sorely disappointing. Flutter was easier to install and get working, but Dart seems to be as verbose as Java with some JavaScript style syntax mixed in.…
While it's good feedback to the respective project owners to make onboarding easier, it is a mistake to judge tools based on In the beginning of a devs experience framework code appears to eclipse app code in size and complexity, but over time the app will tend to grow to overwhelm the framework.
Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful
#36While 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…
I think the popularity of Electron has shown that is actually isn't very important to users to use native controls.
Also on Desktop, macOS is the only one that even has a single official "native" toolkit.
Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful
#37A solid alternative is Intel's Multi-OS Engine: https://multi-os-engine.org/
All it does is let you write iOS UI code in Java or Kotlin, and target both iOS and Android from a single project.
It uses the actual underlying iOS API, and simply provides Java wrappers for them, that map one-to-one.
I keep wondering, and don't know why it hasn't gained much traction. It is so much better than Flutter, is obviously reliable since it's a simple 1-1 mapping/translation layer. (There is more work involved with it, as you have to write the UI lawyer twice, but that's about it.)
Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful
#38So.. in summary Flutter is a buggy unfinished and badly designed framework. Nothing new here folks.
Not as simple as that. Some people clearly manage to create things effectively with it. Newcomers can see this but understand that there will be difficulties.
The difficulty for newcomers is anticipating where the pain points might be. Detailed articles like this are rare and a huge help with assisting with decisions on whether to invest time into it.
Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful
#39For those who are looking for an alternative to Flutter/React Native, please check out Nativescript @ https://docs.nativescript.org ! It's different in a few key ways: - Draws native components (Flutter draws every pixel) - Pure JS native (i.e. JNI powered) shim layer (you can write stuff like `const intent = new Intent()`) - Typescript as first-class (not quite so with React Native, and IMO Typescript > Dart as far…
Pity. It seems to be mobile only.