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Flutter 2

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Re: Flutter 2

#321
post #172

Honest question, what's Google's angle with flutter? It's one thing to be develop a toolkit for platforms they have a vested interest in, it's an entirely different thing to create such a toolkit for all platforms, including their competition.

I think there's value in having a certain amount of ownership and control of a developer ecosystem. It's open-source, but Google will probably remain associated with Flutter and have the dominant influence on its future.

I'm not totally sure what you mean by "a toolkit for platforms they have a vested interest in". Google has a vested interest in basically all the platforms out there. They might create Android, but they certainly make a lot of apps for iOS. I'm guessing they'd like to simplify things using Flutter. Mac and Windows might not see a huge number of native Google apps, but that could change over time - especially if they have a way of making a web version and a desktop version out of the same codebase. Imagine a native macOS Gmail client using Flutter. The same code that could compile to JS for the web could compile down to native for macOS.

Having something be open source and widely adopted makes a language and ecosystem stronger. The Go authors noted that they open-sourced Go because it would become stronger as more people used it.

And I wouldn't underestimate the soft power that comes from being in charge of one of these things. VSCode, .NET Core, and TypeScript are all free, but it's given Microsoft a huge amount of soft power in the ecosystem and a lot of credibility and mind-share.

With a cross-platform UI kit, you can definitely end up with a lot of power. Maybe the experience on Android feels better and more native because your engineers are putting their effort into the Android UI and its patterns more. That's not to say that they'd purposefully make the iOS experience bad or anything, but maybe the iOS-style widgets don't get quite as much polish and maybe developers get encouraged or defaulted into shipping Android-style Material Design apps to iOS. Again, I'm not saying this is malicious, I'm just saying that Google might spend more time on the pieces that are important to them. Google's web docs for Flutter could easily include sections for "and this is how you hook it up to Google Cloud".

I think it's also important to recognize that while Android has more marketshare globally, Apple is generally more popular in the US and generally more popular with upper-income folks. Apps like Clubhouse often launch as iOS-only. 11 months after launch and the Hottest New Thing™ is still iOS-only. If Google can convince developers to use Flutter for the Next Big Thing™, it guarantees that it will be available for Android.

I think there's a lot of value for Google. Your teams can build better apps in less time cross-platform. You potentially become a leader in the way that Facebook has with React, Microsoft has with VSCode/.NET Core/TypeScript, etc. You guarantee first-class support for your devices. You guarantee that the new things you want supported will get supported since you can prioritize your engineers on it - and potentially even get supported in the way you want. And potentially some nice tie-ins to Google Cloud and Firebase via first-class support, documentation, etc.

Re: Flutter 2

#322

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…

Flutters model really fundamentally isn’t there “right one”. It truly is the successor to Flash, but with Google behind it.

But if you want to make apps that feel actually native on their platforms, React has it handily beat. It’s a better fundamental model, that even with a slower language and runtime feels better in the end by far.

Re: Flutter 2

#323
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds awful. Like some sort of bullshit DRM in a way. Now I'm thinking of all the ways I could get screwed here. * Not being able to copy transactions from my bank account * Not being able to easily send text to a read-later service (not sure if this necessarily depends on selectable text, but who knows, maybe selectable means the text isn't visible to these services now) * Not being able to easily copy somethi…

You know devs can already make text not selectable on the web, right?

Yes but on the web you can use a user-agent that doesn't care about what the site says should be selectable, or at least an extension that overrides the CSS in question.

Re: Flutter 2

#324

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…

Because Google is focused on language and tooling development, but forgot to create a killer app example with publicly available source code. Show us a minor Google property re-done in Flutter with code examples and people would flock to it.

But. They. Won't.

Re: Flutter 2

#325

I want to love Flutter. But once looking at it, it's a no go. It's the new flash. Really, you cannot copy the text anymore. React native is my goto solution now.

Flutter team member here. In Flutter, the developer consciously decides which text should be selectable (and thus copy/paste'able), so while it's true that text is not inherently selectable in a Flutter app, text that the app developer decided to make selectable will be.

Come on. Isn't this only happening because the initial text widget did not have text selection, the one with text selection came later and now we are in this bad situation? Just enable text selection for both/all text widgets when targeting the web. You could couple that with a major version increase...

This feedback you get here will only get worse with time, and it will block adoption.

Re: Flutter 2

#326
Needing more integration support from e-commerce perspective. There are some right ideas like the feel for flash but also some wrong ideas here. Maybe requires here a fresh look at what is needed which can solve developer and business needs.

Re: Flutter 2

#327
post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever tried one of your demos in Firefox on Mobile and Desktop? They're completely unusable in Firefox. For example, it only scrolls 3 pixels per rotation of the scroll wheel on Windows 10

Firefox is on the Google chopping block. They won't admit it but they're killing it by a thousand CSS cuts.

Why are you guys here on HN still using Chrome? There is literally not a single reason I can think of to be supporting this behemoth that is killing the open web. Firefox is excellent actually and Firebug IMO is far superior to Chrome's offering. I understand non-techies using it like they used Explorer, but come on guys.

Re: Flutter 2

#328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you share any example of Flutter Web that isn't a extremely basic Todo app, doesn't completely break regular browser UX and works without being slow as molasses? I haven't seen one. I like Flutter, but I don't think the Flutter Web design is very viable for production apps. It renders everything in canvas. Dart is already sluggish on native, and cross compiled to JS it's usually unusable. I think Flutter will be…

I assume their medium term plan is to make the new wasm backend the default rather than continuing to rely on transpiling.

The gallery already downloads a wasm file for me. Not sure if it's used.

ps: for me the Gallery is extremely laggy in Firefox, but works decently well on Chrome. Maybe wasm is enabled on Chrome only.

Re: Flutter 2

#329

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…

Are you a native mobile developer? I am (was I'm moving to ML/AI/Data engineering) and I don't think flutter is in any way easier or nicer than the native toolchains for mobile. Both Swift and Kotlin are better languages than Dart IMO, the IDE and tooling is far superior for both also. Flutter is faster but once to deploy a substandard quality of app for sure but matching the quality of a native app? That takes just…

I am a native mobile developer, and I am presuming GP is most definitely not, because I completely agree with you.

Re: Flutter 2

#330
post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> crappy tech What kind of an argument is this? Not wanting to learn all those things for multiple languages is valid. But "it would take a while" doesn't tell you anything about whether a language is crappy. The odds are pretty close to 50:50 that the language you already know is the crappier one.

My main point is that developers chase shiny things and "easy to use" is one of the shiniest things out there. Past a certain point, being usable in 2 clicks is a negative signal for overall tech quality. Most of the really solid techs need some extra configuration. The classic example of crappy tech is the DB tech that listens on 0.0.0.0 after installation, with no user + pass or admin/admin.

> Past a certain point, being usable in 2 clicks is a negative signal for overall tech quality. Most of the really solid techs need some extra configuration. The classic example of crappy tech is the DB tech that listens on 0.0.0.0 after installation, with no user + pass or admin/admin.

Yeah, but the post up there said 2-3 days. That's plenty of time to handle those important details that make a project non-instant.

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