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We're forking Flutter

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Re: We're forking Flutter

#531
post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is Qt within a GNOME or Xfce environment any more "native" than Qt on Windows or Mac? You have reduced the definition of "native" to merely compatible with X11/Wayland (that's the only common denominator). Well now, Tk, FLTK, Swing, and even Wine are all native.

Both Qt and GTK have facilities for integrating into each other’s desktop environments (see [1]). Sometimes they blend in nicely, sometimes they stand out a bit, but I think it works out pretty okay. [1]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Uniform_look_for_Qt_and_GTK...

> Both Qt and GTK have facilities for integrating into each other’s desktop environments

Neither Qt nor GTK are desktop environments and Qt certainly isn’t defined by a dominant desktop environment - KDE isn’t even what pays their bills.

You’re still proving my point. The common denominator here (on Linux) is just X11/Wayland. If it works out “pretty okay”, then score one for a cross platform toolkit. Still no idea what über alles “native” means.

Let’s go back to the original comment I responded to… why should I not just continue with the Qt “stupid” “hobbyhorse”

Re: We're forking Flutter

#533
post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure what you mean by this but Python can be very performant when you want it to be. That is to say, when you build computation heavy parts in C (or Zig), and remember to avoid the various performance pitfalls like not using generators when you didn’t want to load all those millions of elements into your memory. What sets professional Python aside from most other programming languages is that everyone who use…

Here's one source on Python very obviously not matching Node.js's perf on a simple microbenchmark: https://jott.live/markdown/nodejs_vs_python_ CPython really is inherently less performant than V8. CPython, until very recently, didn't have a JIT at all. It compiles scripts to bytecode, then runs the bytecode in a giant case statement. It doesn't have a tracing profiler-guided optimizer or an exotic garbage collector.…

I fail to see how Python 3.8.2 could in anyway be relevant in 2024.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#534
post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure what you mean by this but Python can be very performant when you want it to be. That is to say, when you build computation heavy parts in C (or Zig), and remember to avoid the various performance pitfalls like not using generators when you didn’t want to load all those millions of elements into your memory. What sets professional Python aside from most other programming languages is that everyone who use…

So, basically: Python is performant when you don't use Python?

Yes. Is that so weird? JS is also performant when you don’t use JS considering you’re running it on C or Rust and are likely using the FFI if you’re doing any form of computation heavy work.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#535
post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to listen to the details, like "where is the back button", "Why does text work differently". There are some people that understand that it is different from the standard, but most just get annoyed. The discussion here is from a technical perspective why it is better, conformity of the app on different platforms vs standard behavior between different apps. There are very few people that care about the technic…

I'd also like to meet all these mythical users that have devices from every platform and want all their apps to look the same across all platforms. 99% of people I know IRL are in one ecosystem, with the exception of some that have an iPhone/iPad + Windows PC

In a previous company when we were looking at precisely this problem, building out multiple platform support, we did UX studies where this question in particular came up. The vast majority of people said they wanted apps to act consistently across devices. Most people on the planet use Windows with Android, statistically speaking, which are not similar devices at all, at least on Apple platforms you can use Swift for desktop and phone but not so for Windows and Android, so you have to make a choice at that point.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Out of interest, do you know many seriously vision-impared people? Windows, and Mac OS X in particular, have quite good support for accessibility if you use their built-in GUI systems, and unified UIs are often (not always, vscode and chrome are quite good, for example), very bad, sometimes just a black square as far as accessibility goes.

Many cross platform frameworks have good accessibility support, not sure what that has to do with native platforms, as the cross platform solutions simply hook into the native platform accessibility APIs anyway.

https://docs.flutter.dev/ui/accessibility-and-internationali...

Re: We're forking Flutter

#537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the end users that care about the uniformity but the fact the corporate design team wants there to be uniformity across all their platforms they support. This is part of branding and user experience. I'm not arguing for or against, just stating that is where the push for this comes from. It would make support, for example, easier, if all versions of your app user experience were similar.

I'm not quite sure why this was downvoted. It's true.

It's because while it's true on the company side, this comment is making it seem as if the company is doing this against their users' will, while in reality, most users genuinely want a unified experience across platforms for their apps, as seen by some of the comments here.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#538
post #348

> 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 we…

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Re: We're forking Flutter

#539

A lot of people here are comparing Flutter with programming languages like Python, PHP, etc. It shows how under appreciated UI development is and the amount of complexity UI developers need to handle. Also UI framework developers are always at the mercy of someone else when it comes to their destiny, unlike programming language creators which "almost" control it fully. Apple, Google, MS all keep changing their OS and…

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Re: We're forking Flutter

#540
post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you know that zero texting apps nowadays use native input anyway right? even native apps will implement their own input and it's always awful, but the pm needs those style previews... (you're still right thought)

Checked my whatsapp and tg, both use absolutely native inputs. The selection handles & menu, the hold-spacebar movement, the hold-to-magnify feature on ios is the same as everywhere else. If that’s not native, they did a great job for nothing. Too lazy to check on android rn, but I recently worked with the apps/chats on it and entered text, it didn’t feel different.

In fact the input field is one of the few native UI surfaces in the Telegram app.
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