Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We're forking Flutter

flutterfoundation.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 748 posts

Re: We're forking Flutter

#341

Post by int_19h »

maxrmk wrote: post #179
com2kid wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Back when I worked on .net we had fewer than 50 people maintaining a product that shipped to over a billion machines. If you opened an issue on github we'd usually reply that day. It depends on an org's priorities and what gets put on someone's reviews. During one of the years when I worked on Windows Mobile (before Windows Phone!) we had an objective handed down from on high that we were to spend so many hours a w…

Totally– This was in the early days of open source .net, when it was still called .net core. We had just moved onto GitHub and I don’t think microsoft had quite figured out how to manage that organizationally. There is a point of time there where the fastest way to reach an engineer was not to go through a tier one contract that you pay microsoft millions of dollars for, but instead to just open an issue on the GitHu…

It really depends on the product. I don't know about .NET, but it's still the case for anything to do with VSCode, for example.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#342

Post by epcoa »

jeremyjh wrote: post #307
epcoa wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's a native UI? The only thing closeish to a native UI is macOS and iOS AppKit and UIKit. Winforms aka Win32 is still a thing, but Microsoft has been undogfooding that and putting out alternatives for years, now WinUI3 will definitely kill off Winforms for good! What is native on Linux? Gtk, Qt, Motif (lol)? And then Android? Ironic then that Google is the one behind Flutter. The concept of native outside of MacO…

Win32 is the native GUI toolkit on Windows. Winforms is a .NET wrapper to it. There isn't any debate to be had there. Yes, the same vendor provides other toolkits. Linux is a kernel project, and different distributions are for many purposes best considered to be different OS's. Desktops based on Linux mostly are either GTK or QT, and so the native toolkit depends on the desktop you are using. Is this too much fragmen…

> Linux is a kernel project,

Is that useful pedantry? From context, you really think that's my confusion here? I didn't include *BSD either, but it isn't any different for the relative handful of people using that for a desktop system.

> Win32 is the native GUI toolkit on Windows. Winforms is a .NET wrapper to it. There isn't any debate to be had there.

Except for Microsoft's numerous attempts to supplant it and the fact that the base OS doesn't even use it consistently for their own system. Microsoft's own File Explorer and Settings app that only had to live along with Control Panel for a decade, was that not native? They aren't "Win32". If you insist on pedantry, you should know Win32 isn't a GUI toolkit either, it's an anachronistic term for the Windows API. Nobody casually calls it USER though, and the bulk of people still targeting it do so through .NET these days via Winforms.

If native just means provided by the vendors base system, ok, but then if there are 10 different forms of it, other than the distribution issue there isn't some great intrinsic benefit over just targeting Qt or Flutter. Especially when someone like Microsoft can't settle on a consistent design language through the years.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#343

Post by ascorbic »

IshKebab wrote: post #148
kgeist wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FlutterShurk says 3 apps on my phone use Flutter. Device Info (a different app) reports that's 0.2% of all my apps...

I only got one (ASDA), I'm pretty sure it's just a webview though so I'm not sure why they are using Flutter. Hard to say it is "everywhere". It's probably more popular than any of the other cross platform alternatives though.

There are 25 on mine, so ymmv

Re: We're forking Flutter

#345

Post by satvikpendem »

deergomoo wrote: post #251
divan wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but not every cross-platform app developer wants their app to look "native to iOS". Especially if you want your app to look the same on all platforms and/or have some creative design.

I can appreciate that as a developer, but as a user I don’t particularly care that some company wants to ship identical looking apps on every device under the sun. I would prefer the apps I use to work and behave in a consistent way, using the same platform idioms I am used to. The software available and how it works was a large part of the reason I chose the platform I did. Of course, I recognise that, a. most peopl…

Only on HN do I hear anyone talking about platform native controls versus unified UI across devices. I have not once heard of such a complaint in the real world and indeed, I have more often heard users wanting a unified UI over one that changes with each platform, simply because these days we have multiple devices where we expect apps to work the same.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#346

Post by knifie_spoonie »

int_19h wrote: post #333
knifie_spoonie wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Of course, I recognise that, a. most people just don’t care about platform idioms This is the big one. HN commenters are not representative of the average user. You'd have to specifically point out the differences for them to even notice, and even then they simply don't care.

Casual users don't care about the app "looking wrong". They do care about the app not working like other apps on their phone, though.

I've not found this to be the case at all. They only seem to care whether the app does what they want or not.

Granted this is my personal experience, I can't say this is the case for every single user out there.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#348

Post by 1st1 »

> How large is the Flutter team, today? Google doesn't publish this information, but my guess is that the team is about 50 people strong.

> That's 50 people serving the needs of 1,000,000. Doing a little bit of division, that means that every single member of the Flutter team is responsible for the needs of 20,000 Flutter developers! That ratio is clearly unworkable for any semblance of customer support.

This is a weird exercise. Python, for example, is a #1/#2 language in the world and there's only 50 active core devs, 90% of which don't even work on Python full time. Somehow we make that work.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#349

Post by lawgimenez »

deergomoo wrote: post #215
divan wrote: post #120

> We describe Flock as "Flutter+". In other words, we do not want, or intend, to fork the Flutter community. Flock will remain constantly up to date with Flutter. That was the first fear when I saw the title - splitting community and having two incompatible versions. Good to see it addressed in the post. The second was just a fear of how it would complicate the development process, but it seems to be a drop-in replac…

> Most people don't realize how many apps written in Flutter they use daily, simply because it's impossible to tell You can't be serious. Maybe on Android, but on other platforms—especially iOS—they stick out like a sore thumb. A number of them just look like Material Design Android apps awkwardly transplanted over, but I know that's down to the developer so I won't hold that against Flutter. But scrolling through th…

On Android you can also tell the way the list scrolls. Especially on devices, 2-3 years older.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#350

Post by mh- »

orta wrote: post #311
zachrip wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm suspicious of those because it shows an ebay logo but then shows an app I've never heard of or used...is this the same for all the other logos? Where does NYT use flutter?

Flutter web publicly launched with a NYT prototype https://verygood.ventures/success-stories/new-york-times

I recognize that as the NYT Games (formerly NYT Crossword) app.

It has some very annoying non-native behavior, like bringing up the text selection/highlight menu in inappropriate places (in a word puzzle with no selectable text).

Post reply on HN