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Flutter 2

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Re: Flutter 2

#461

Post by 0xFluegel »

danShumway wrote: post #360
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 know if they've changed their approach over the past year, but the last time I looked at Qt demos for the web, I was solidly unimpressed. At the time, they were making almost all of the same mistakes that Flutter is, and the devs I talked to seemed to be of the opinion that those problems wouldn't be fixed until browsers started adding brand new capabilities specifically for them. Looking now at the demos at…

> Looking now at the demos at https://www.qt.io/qt-examples-for-webassembly, a lot of the same problems are jumping out at me. A complete lack of accessibility features, poor handling of scroll events, large load times, unfocusable fields, lack of keyboard controls, etc...

I found that hard to believe. But, clicking that link and trying the pizza demo... Yikes. It's not exaggerated at all.

Re: Flutter 2

#462

Post by dmitriid »

TheGuyWhoCodes wrote: post #341
throwaway123x2 wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oof remember when PhoneGap was the next big thing? RIP

I remember big corps betting on phonegap and sencha for mobile 7 years ago. I also remember big corps betting on GWT. Those were painful days...

Funnily enough, Sencha still can't be reliably recreated by any lib/framework/browser built-ins du jour (without sinking as much effort as Sencha did): https://examples.sencha.com/extjs/7.3.0/examples/kitchensink...

Re: Flutter 2

#463

Post by danShumway »

themacguffinman wrote: post #366
mkl wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is annoying, but is at least trivial to get around with browser debugging tools. The web developer is not the person whose expectations matter. Selecting label text is almost essential for being to explain to someone else how to do things, or communicate about the interface with the site developer.

Depends on the label, it's not essential for plenty of things. I don't, for example, need to copy "Cancel" in my browser before I am capable of talking about the cancel button in the UI. You're right, user expectations are what matter, and users do not expect most buttons and controls to be text-selectable. It was never an expectation in native apps while users find it frustrating when control labels unexpectedly see…

But it changes quite a lot for me.

"This thing that will noticeably make your web experience worse won't affect John over there, so why are you complaining" is not the best response.

I like to be able to override developer decisions about what text is and isn't selectable, and Flutter basically makes that impossible.

Re: Flutter 2

#464

Post by Hixie »

zmmmmm wrote: post #460
Hixie wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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…

HackerNews uses tables for layout, inline styles, and still forces browsers into quirks mode. Yeah, it can handle slightly bumping up the font size. I can also bump up my font size on Windows, macOS, and Android, and that works for 90% of apps there too.

I agree that the open web is an amazing achievement. I don't think Wasm and WebGL take away from that at all. It's just the next logical step to make the web possible for an even greater set of applications.

Re: Flutter 2

#465

Post by nsainsbury »

tobyhede wrote: post #416

Flutter is not for everything, but it is really worth a look. We (AU MVNO/Telco) recently converted iOS and Android apps (200,000 MAUs) to Flutter and it has been game changing. We had experimented with react native and found it just didn't deliver. Flutter is different. On mobile platforms the experience is super responsive and smooth and for your typical consumer app indistinguishable from the native experience. Th…

From what I've seen and has been confirmed quite a few times now Flutter definitely does not deliver on producing mobile apps that are "super responsive and...indistinguishable from the native experience"

You can even find the director of engineering for Flutter confirming that's not the case on a thread on Reddit along with numerous devs reporting being burned by Flutter and swearing off using it ever again: https://www.reddit.com/r/FlutterDev/comments/llmkd4/ios_jank...

Re: Flutter 2

#466

Post by dmitriid »

amelius wrote: post #421
jaegerpicker wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe because native apps are a better experience, nearly every time. True multi-threading, native code performance, latest UI implementation, more and better hardware access/performance, etc.... I can keep going but the point is that the web really is the lowest common denominator. That isn't bad but it also isn't how you build the best experience.

If OS vendors wanted web-apps to succeed, they could have done a lot more than they have done so far. E.g. better integration, or improved web standards to optimize for certain cases.

No matter how "better you integrate", there's one big core issue: the DOM. You simply cannot make the DOM behave as smoothly an as reliably as a native app. And no, no amount of "improved web standards" can help with that.

Re: Flutter 2

#467

Post by bliteben »

ledak wrote: post #239
mdoms wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

To be fair there were some flash sites I’ve still never seen anything that equals. I think the way flash marketed to more designers and content creators was both what made it awesome and maybe its downfall.

Re: Flutter 2

#468

Post by oscargrouch »

danShumway wrote: post #402
eseidelGoogle wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[Flutter Eng. Dir. here] I really appreciate the feedback. We clearly have more work to do on the Web side of Flutter. Unlike the Mobile side which has shipped 100,000s of apps, the Web side may be up to like 1000. :) So many more issues to address as we work closely with more users to get their apps into production. If you'd like to track progress on any of these, I'd encourage you (or anyone else reading) to please…

I appreciate that building something that works even this well targeting Canvas must have been a metric ton of work, and I'm impressed. But that's kind of the issue -- it cannot possibly be more work to maintain a separate rendering/compilation pipeline for browsers than it is to rebuild the entirety of Chrome's DOM engine in WebGL for CanvasKit. I just don't see how Flutter is going to keep pace with "native" web ap…

Its nice to have absolute control of the rendering going over canvas if you are a flutter platform developer and i think even playing the catch-up game they should get there eventually.

But i don't think this is the real issue here.. Flutter is more of a Flash and GWT lineage, and that's fine if that's what you are looking for.

But i bet on the Web every time, its the most popular UI (and now much more) platform ever. So while some will go through the Flutter and React way of doing things, most will just stick with the web.

The web is the most sophisticated platform ever built. It gives you a lot of power and freedom, so i don't understand why some prefer to get stuck into a cubicle when you have so much space?

Its nice to have frameworks to make things easy and developers more productive, but the ones that do this without alienating the developer from the bigger, broad and sophisticated framework are just better.

Just let them be the new Flash, now at least open and over the web, and look for other approaches if you want to maintain real control and freedom, instead of delegating to the platform developers.

Re: Flutter 2

#469

Post by danShumway »

offtop5 wrote: post #420
plorkyeran wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of the complaints about flutter I see here are based on people using apps built with flutter, and not about the development experience. "Have you actually build a project in flutter?" is a total non-sequitor response to complaints about how even the official demo is miserable to use.

Would you not buy a screwdriver because some people with that screwdriver don't build chairs correctly ? Like with Unity, the power of cross-platform development leads many to just assume apps work across platforms automatically. This is absolutely not the case, you need to properly QA any code you write and code it to accommodate each platform's quirks.

But these are the official demos.

I would not buy a screwdriver if a salesperson walked up to me, said "look how great this screwdriver is" and then the chair they were holding as an example immediately fell apart in their hands. There's a difference between a dev community building apps that perform badly and the actual platform advocates showing off apps that can't perform.

Re: Flutter 2

#470

Post by neurostimulant »

kureikain wrote: post #50

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.

Would adblockers work on these kind of webapps? Adblocker typically look for specific piece of js files and DOM nodes to block ads, but Flutter web doesn't really work like that, no?
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