Flutter. Remember, it exists so Google can ram more ads and tracking down our throats (and eventually replace HTML and an open web).
Don't use it.
Launch HN: FlutterFlow (YC W21) – Build Apps Visually
51–60 of 64 posts
Re: Launch HN: FlutterFlow (YC W21) – Build Apps Visually
#52Beautiful product!
As the saying goes, the best "enterprise" products are borne out of frustration you experience while trying to build your own consumer product - sounds like this was exactly how you landed on FlutterFlow :-)
Re: Launch HN: FlutterFlow (YC W21) – Build Apps Visually
#53This looks awesome, but sadly, your education plan is practically unusable for most of Latin America, where .edu (or .ac) email addresses are very rare. I'm a college student and I can't apply because my university uses our country TLD. I hope you can reconsider this policy and begin using university domain lists [1] instead of just checking for TLDs. [1]: See https://github.com/Hipo/university-domains-list , by exam…
We're allow-listing domains for any educational institutions that's not on our list. Thanks for sending that link, we'll take a look!
Integrating with https://education.github.com/pack/ might be easier as GitHub takes care of all the verification processes. (and it allows high-school students too)
Re: Launch HN: FlutterFlow (YC W21) – Build Apps Visually
#54Absolutely fantastic. I’m a big Flutter fan and I figured it was just a matter of time before someone conjured this up. Well done lads.
How do you find flutter's resource use (CPU/RAM) and general UI performance compared to native equivalents? There have been charged arguments on HN over the past few months over it. Ex: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26335062
It's not quite an apples-to-apples comparison, but the memory use of FlutterFlow is comparable to WebFlow. Our landing page is built using WebFlow, and I compared memory use of that to a comparably sized project in FF.
Performance could certainly be improved (especially for Web), but it's gotten much better over the last year.
Re: Launch HN: FlutterFlow (YC W21) – Build Apps Visually
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for the suggestions! Yes, there's definitely room for improvement with the generated code ... I think the padding -> SizedBox conversion at least in some cases (only when main-axis padding is added) can be automated. We can experiment with code improvement features such as that and see how it works. Expanded + Percentages for widths are possible already
At the risk of seeming a little bit nitpicky here, thing is: the end user shouldnt even use padding in this case. What Im saying is that when I look at a tool like that, what I will look for is how well you embrace the paradigm of the framework. Cause its greater than html5 imo - for the use cases were talking about. It should lead to fewer editor UI, fewer buttons, fewer basic options. Padding in this case should pr…
Agreed, making it more natural to create apps in a way that follows Flutter best practices is a desirable end goal. There's so much to improve, it's exciting :-)
Re: Launch HN: FlutterFlow (YC W21) – Build Apps Visually
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
I took it last year, the woman has a mesmerizing voice! (and the course is great too :D) If you're an experienced software dev it's a bit basic. I like Flutter a lot, but I'm not a fan of Dart. It's a false friend, it makes you believe it's simple and mostly a copy of your favorite language, but once you start to dig a little deeper it feels like something bolted on, hacky, not designed. I come from the .net world wh…
Flutnet[1] - either a dream come true, or a nightmare. [1] https://www.flutnet.com/
I don't really get this. Both Flutter and Xamarin are hybrid frameworks. Mixing them up just seems ..... pointless. What's there to be gained?
Re: Launch HN: FlutterFlow (YC W21) – Build Apps Visually
#57The example app doesn’t work on latest iOS Safari on iPhone SE 2020. After 2 long loading screens you can progress through the app until you need to pick categories, but that screen is unscrollable, so you’re stuck. Trying to go back breaks navigation and dumps you on a login page after a while.
Re: Launch HN: FlutterFlow (YC W21) – Build Apps Visually
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
I took it last year, the woman has a mesmerizing voice! (and the course is great too :D) If you're an experienced software dev it's a bit basic. I like Flutter a lot, but I'm not a fan of Dart. It's a false friend, it makes you believe it's simple and mostly a copy of your favorite language, but once you start to dig a little deeper it feels like something bolted on, hacky, not designed. I come from the .net world wh…
Huh. I really enjoy Dart and found a lot of it very elegant. What about it did you not like?
Of course it's highly subjective but here are a few examples:
There's too much syntactic sugar for my taste to the point it gets diabetic.
Callable classes really? For example you can write MyClass()();
Underscore to mark a variable or a function private, but you can still use an underscore to declare a variable inside a function so it muddles the comprehension. Are we going to lose some precious milliseconds if we have to write private in front of a variable?
There's also the need to use buildrunner for almost everything since the language wasn't thought out for modern use cases. It works, but this is very inelegant IMHO. When I peak at the generated code I don't feel fluent in Dart quite the opposite.
Then there's the ultra strict linter that won't let me add an empty new line where I want. The resulting code is very compact and is harder to read.
Re: Launch HN: FlutterFlow (YC W21) – Build Apps Visually
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
I took it last year, the woman has a mesmerizing voice! (and the course is great too :D) If you're an experienced software dev it's a bit basic. I like Flutter a lot, but I'm not a fan of Dart. It's a false friend, it makes you believe it's simple and mostly a copy of your favorite language, but once you start to dig a little deeper it feels like something bolted on, hacky, not designed. I come from the .net world wh…
Flutnet[1] - either a dream come true, or a nightmare. [1] https://www.flutnet.com/
Wow I never encountered Flutnet before. It's more of a nightmare IMHO, my goal moving to flutter was to avoid Xamarin in the first place!
Re: Launch HN: FlutterFlow (YC W21) – Build Apps Visually
#60Is Flutter still a promising bet? Haven't heard much about it lately, but in principle I find it very interesting.
Edit: wow, I am surprised, according to statista it is the most popular mobile cross platform framework (roughly on par with React Native): https://www.statista.com/statistics/869224/worldwide-softwar...