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Flutter looks good, but is painful

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Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful

#51

Post by nnq »

pcr910303 wrote: post #17

While 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…

> Coherent UI is a very important point to users

Nah, it ain't. At all! I used to believe it did. That's what we geeks think. And on mobile it doesn't matters for us either - keybings working consistently doesn't matter you're only using touch...

Same thing with React Native, everyone thought it's awesome because native UI controls. But users never care about that. For touch UIs it's more user friendly to have you app be friendly by being unique. The thing that "users prefer native" was just because users like fast and responsive UIs, if Flutter can provide fast and responsive UIs, nobody cares if it isn't native.

Even on desktop, the best UIs I've ever seen (take the new Blender's 2.8 widely appreciated UI) just use OpenGL and draw their own widgets.

People say they care about "coherence" or "consistency" when they are too clueless to figure out what's actually broken about their UIs, so they assume this is the issue. An awesome UX/I is one that would keep being awesome even if each and every button would have a different and inconsistent style, what matters is higher level. Let us stop bitching about things being incoherent or inconsistent when the actual issue is the lack of ability to figure out what is so wrong with a UI that it hinders users!

(Oh, and everyone will always want custom branding and styles, whether we like it or not... We need technology that can embrace uniqueness and incoherence and inconsistency and make it work properly and shippable in time!)

Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful

#52

Post by iainmerrick »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #47
jazoom wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

IMO it really depends. There's a lot of big companies that have more than enough resources to be able to pay multiple dev teams to build and maintain apps across operating systems. From a few years ago, Twitter and Facebook were famous examples. They pushed so hard to try and build their apps using web technology but kept running into performance issues (thanks to infinite scrolling). After spending fuck knows how mu…

people overestimate how complex it is to build multiple native apps in parallel.

I agree, although there are now more platforms to deal with than back in the days when it was just Mac and Windows: add iOS, Android, desktop web, mobile web.

I think it also helps when it's easy to share code between platforms, which again, used to be easier when you were just targeting the desktop (just use C or C++).

Now it's a bit harder because there are no great languages that span all platforms easily without a bit of hacking. Most languages are managed and memory-safe now; that's a good thing, but it makes them more heavyweight and less portable. They generally want to drag in their own frameworks (e.g. Flutter, React Native) rather than letting you put your own UI layer on top.

Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful

#53

Post by codetrotter »

hardwaresofton wrote: post #34
deanclatworthy wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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): https://www.nativescript.org/ 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=qR1ESQTAL…

> NativeScript

Installed the Playground app. When I try to open any of the examples from https://market.nativescript.org/?tab=samples&framework=all_f..., Safari says “Safari cannot open the page because the address is invalid”.

For example, https://play.nativescript.org/?template=play-js&id=h9CNcL&v=... tries to open nsplay://boot?pKey=pub-c-a303d41e-5c6b-4030-8151-c056278a7944&sKey=sub-c-2d2f1312-4f78-11e7-ab90-02ee2ddab7fe&template=play-js&sessionId=h9CNcL_3542

Running iOS 12.3.1 on an iPhone X. Is anyone else having this issue?

Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful

#54

Post by TeMPOraL »

pjmlp wrote: post #42
jazoom wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Only when one doesn't use a solution like having the common logic in a portable language like C++, with bindings to native UI elements. A solution used by plenty of commercial desktop software as we moved from Assembly as main application language for desktop apps during the 16 bit days.

Agreed. Mixing business logic and UI works in simple applications, prototypes, or applications intended to ever work with one platform and UI paradigm. Outside of that, you're supposed to keep your "business logic" and UI separate (isn't this exactly why people invented MVC?).

Maintaining "5 different native UI applications" should involve one codebase with the whole internal logic, and 5 separate UI layers mediating between that logic and the platform it's being run on (including UI). It should not involve rewriting the same thing 5 times.

Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful

#55

Post by mstade »

nnq wrote: post #51
pcr910303 wrote: post #17

While 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…

> Coherent UI is a very important point to users Nah, it ain't. At all! I used to believe it did. That's what we geeks think. And on mobile it doesn't matters for us either - keybings working consistently doesn't matter you're only using touch... Same thing with React Native, everyone thought it's awesome because native UI controls. But users never care about that. For touch UIs it's more user friendly to have you ap…

Neither you nor the parent poster substantiate your assertions with sources, which made me curious of what research might have been done in this area. Some cursory searching lead me to this reasonably well sourced answer, which suggests the parent poster is right in this case: https://ux.stackexchange.com/a/39295

Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful

#56

Post by meerita »

My experience working with Flutter:

- Overclomplicated syntax. - Material Design doesn't look as good as the native. Feels like imitation in many cases. - no vector drawable, PDF or Lottie support - I had to create special code for iOS to match certain patterns and components. - Typopraphy done wrong.

Flutter maybe something good to start with, but once you want to reach good app design/code maintain that would be painfull and you will feel faster and more organized if you do things in their native realms.

Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful

#57

Post by nicoburns »

pcr910303 wrote: post #17

While 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'm hoping a cross-platform UI takes over the world. Then it will be the "native" UI's that seem inconsistent.

Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful

#58

Post by nicoburns »

pjmlp wrote: post #42
jazoom wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Only when one doesn't use a solution like having the common logic in a portable language like C++, with bindings to native UI elements. A solution used by plenty of commercial desktop software as we moved from Assembly as main application language for desktop apps during the 16 bit days.

A lot of mobile apps are almost entirely UI...

Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful

#59

Post by tobiaswk »

I simply love Flutter for Android and iOS development and have been using it since alpha. I haven't tried the web application part; I'm pretty sure I never will. Here's my opinion. I've created several apps with Flutter and every time I enjoy it. The UI is easy to make beautiful and the resulting code easy to read. It feels like all what the current Android SDK is missing. The current Android SDK is old and quite frankly painfull to work with. You just can't create beautiful apps with ease; it's always a hassle. It's also messy and not easy to read the resulting code. The way the whole way the framework is structured entails ugly code in my opinion. This all becomes evident when you use different apps on Google Play. You get the sense that every app reinvented their UI; there is no real UI continuity. Google became a freeloader after JetBrains created Kotlin and marketed it will. The thing is Kotlin made just a little better; in terms of boilerplate stuff; the framework I still hate compared to Flutter. What I really like about flutter is the framework and “it’s all a widget” idea. You can basically do crazy things in UI with ease and on the other hand just use the standard UI components with a great result.

As an example I've created an alternative to Nissan's Connect EV app. It's basically a way to control and monitor your electric vehicle from Nissan. The official app is I’m very disappointed by; it’s slow and full of wrong decisions.

My alternative is called "My Leaf" and its available on Google Play and the App Store; https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dk.kjeldsen.ca... https://apps.apple.com/us/app/my-leaf-for-nissan-ev/id143670... It's completely open source.

Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful

#60

Post by aikinai »

IshKebab wrote: post #36
pcr910303 wrote: post #17

While 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.

Electron is popular with developers, not users.
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