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Flutter 2

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Re: Flutter 2

#451

Post by The_rationalist »

throwaway123x2 wrote: post #293
blacktriangle wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're nagging because the apps suck and stick out like a sore thumb. Maybe Flutter will be the one to get there and be the holy grail of cross platform UI development, but the developer community has been burned by this promise so many times, we're going to have to see the final product before getting excited. Just because a project is ambitious doesn't mean we should all jump on board, particularly when similar proj…

Oof remember when PhoneGap was the next big thing? RIP

Pure nonsense, phonegap has been renamed Cordova and is widely used. The Electron of smartphones is Ionic which is a sexy and performant superset of Cordova. PhoneGap (Cordova + Ionic marketshare) has a bigger marketshare than flutter and react native! Source: https://www.appbrain.com/stats/libraries/tag/app-framework/a... Ionic is a gift and it will only get more widespread, the myth that chromium is slow is increasingly dying. Also, did you notice the irony/hypocrisy that flutter is using the rendering engine made by chrome developers for Chrome developers ?

Re: Flutter 2

#452

Post by Hixie »

shawnz wrote: post #195
Hixie wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We actually did try that as our first approach, but it really didn't give you the flexibility that Flutter developers expect. As the erstwhile editor of the HTML standard for ~10 years and the now TL of Flutter I must admit that it's weird to be creating a web framework that completely ignores all the HTML stuff I worked on before. :-) That said, Flutter is different from Flash in some important ways. Flash used the…

> to create true web apps that just happen to not use much of the control set that HTML exposes. That is exactly defeating the point. Flash apps were also "true web apps" that only happen to use the "limited control set" of just . > It's basically how every other platform works That's why there has never been a UI toolkit as successful as the web.

> Flash apps were also "true web apps"

Not really. They were not portable. NPAPI was not a web standard in any meaningful sense (hint: the first N stood for Netscape).

> That's why there has never been a UI toolkit as successful as the web.

The web's success in terms of active users and in terms of deployed content is astounding, certainly. I think I'm relatively well placed to understand why, and I don't think it's because the web restricted developers to one scripting language or one set of controls. I think it is very much _despite_ that.

Re: Flutter 2

#453

Post by bliteben »

bithavoc wrote: post #111
bilal4hmed wrote: post #22

I was honestly surprised to see Microsofts name on there as a contributor

I'm surprised too, they now have: - MFC - WinForms - Windows Presentation Foundation - Xamarin & Xamarin Forms - Universal Windows Apps - WinUI 2 & 3 - React Native fork for Windows (based on WinUI 2 migrating to WinUI 3) - React Native fork for Mac (based on AppKit) And now they also contribute to Flutter, wow.

You forgot blaze and prob uncountable other projects

Re: Flutter 2

#454

Post by f430 »

andrekandre wrote: post #206
CyberDildonics wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this still such a problem in the modern era where major software is released that becomes unusably slow on multi-core cutting edge phones?

just an assumption, but probably because even though it comes from the same company, even on android flutter is not a first-class citizen...? iow, maybe they dont have access to all the internal implementations that give the native toolkit higher performance... can anyone clarify that?

Flutter is way more closer to native than react will ever be

Re: Flutter 2

#455

Post by The_rationalist »

jaegerpicker wrote: post #220
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…

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…

What do you think of jetpack compose? It has reached beta and there is experimental desktop support

Re: Flutter 2

#456

Post by danjac »

oblio wrote: post #262
superkuh wrote: post #181

>Moving forward, Flutter is the default choice for future desktop and mobile apps created by Canonical. This is terrible news. I thought Canonical learned from it's last decade of painful failures to converge desktop and mobile. They have different needs and it doesn't work. What this means is another dark age for the Ubuntu desktop environment.

Well, Canonical is a graveyard of techs. Launchpad, Juju, Unity, Mir, Bzr, upstart, heck, I can't even remember them all.

Snap

Re: Flutter 2

#457

Post by The_rationalist »

vorpalhex wrote: post #446
tofuahdude wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are your thoughts on the business end of deciding to build two separate versions of the app in two languages (not to mention the web) vs the efficiencies of one code base? We're close to needing to make this decision and I'm real hesitant to introduce two additional languages (we're already React for the web but haven't build apps yet) vs a React Native app where our team can be immediately productive.

I was with a team that went the React Native route. At first it was fine until we had to go slightly off the rails.. and I was rebuilding .so files based off random gists and updating linkage assemblies. React Native works until it doesn't and then you are getting into very detailed platform specific territory. A lot of the cross platform promises were untrue - we quickly learned the importance of QAing both builds a…

Or give Ionic react a try

Re: Flutter 2

#458

Post by hamandcheese »

ryandrake wrote: post #436
hanniabu wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why more resources aren't being put into Qt and making that easier to use or building a more "web-developer-friendly" abstraction layer on top.

I don't even fully understand why "cross-platform UI development" is such a holy grail. Is it that expensive to separate your business logic from UI and write the small UI layer in whatever the platform's "best practice" native language is? Is it that hard to find developers who know more than one programming language? With a lot of these frameworks and higher level abstractions, if you go off the toy-app happy path,…

> Is it that expensive to separate your business logic from UI and write the small UI layer in whatever the platform's "best practice" native language is?

I mean... yes? There is a ton of incidental complexity (i.e. unrelated to the business domain) involved in creating nice user experiences. If dev salaries weren’t so high then sure, more companies would probably spend the money to repeat the same work across several platforms, but right now? No way.

That said, I still think I agree that you give up more than you gain by going cross platform, at least for now, but I totally get how companies look at how much it’s costs to hire and says “you know what? I’ll take a cross-platform compromise”

Re: Flutter 2

#459

Post by ksec »

joe_fishfish wrote: post #329
jaegerpicker wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have seen this a lot. Most of those people are Web Developers. They want their Web technology to move towards cross platform native apps. And are frustrated with people bashing or stopping this progress.

On the other hand you have Native Apps developers, while equally being excited about Cross Platform UI and toolset have been burned more than enough. And this didn't even start with Smartphone. It goes back to earlier PC history with Java or even further. None of them were good enough.

At the same time Native Apps developers dont understand why Web Dev or those who has Web Dev background now working on cross platform toolchain constantly push and produce the same thing years after years.

You cant blame them for being skeptical.

Re: Flutter 2

#460

Post by zmmmmm »

Hixie wrote: post #444
zmmmmm wrote: post #313

Reading all the comments it sounds like Flutter is exactly what I feared would come out of things like WebAssembly - a trojan horse to bypass web standards and turn the browser into a shell for shipping applications that put all the power back in the hands of application vendors and take away the power that open standards give to users (portability, accessibility, customisability, interoperability etc etc). Of course…

(I was previous editor of the HTML standard for ~10 years, now I'm the Flutter TL) I mean... you're not wrong. But let's be honest, we never managed to really deliver on the web's promise here. It was and in the 90s, it's WebGL+Wasm now, but the reality is we've never succeeded at true portability (ever tried going to a non-trivial site in lynx? or a web app on your phone?) or accessibility (just ask anyone who uses…

Maybe you aren't giving yourself enough credit?

I just typed this comment using a plugin that gives me vi bindings inside the editor, on a page where I have increased the font size to 110% because I personally find it nicer that way.

All done without the permission of ycombinator and yet working perfectly with their web page. And this is not just because ycombinator has very basic HTML ... this works with at least 90% of web sites I go to.

It may not have achieved its loftiest aims, but I think the open web is an absolutely amazing achievement and success if you compare to what we would have had without it.

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