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Flutter 2

developers.googleblog.com

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Re: Flutter 2

#581

Post by comeonseriously »

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,…

Because developers only want to work with their favorite language/frameworks and managers don't want 7 different teams.

Re: Flutter 2

#582

Post by draw_down »

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…

I like js, warts and all. Particularly its statically typed variants.

Re: Flutter 2

#583

Post by boring_twenties »

achow wrote: post #554
ryandrake wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

The blog exactly answers this. ------------------------ Google Pay switched to Flutter a few months ago for their flagship mobile app, and they already achieved major gains in productivity and quality. By unifying the codebase, the team removed feature disparity between platforms and eliminated over half a million lines of code. Google Pay also reports that their engineers are far more efficient, with a huge reductio…

That's very interesting in light of the facts that

1) This announcement seems to claim that Flutter 2 apps can be deployed as web apps as well as mobile apps, yet

2) This very morning I received an email from Google stating that pay.google.com is going away and the service can only be used via the mobile app going forward.

Re: Flutter 2

#584

Post by danShumway »

themacguffinman wrote: post #526
danShumway wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Supporting new and unique APIs/inputs/etc like WebVR is a pretty classic cross-platform problem and it's usually addressed by allowing native hooks. Flutter has MethodChannels which let you call native methods in the underlying "platform host". It also supports "PlatformViews" which let you embed native widgets. It doesn't really need to have instant parity with "native" web apps at everything. Maybe Flutter is a poo…

It's not just about building special experiences. I want to be able to browse normal websites in VR -- VR and uncommon user agents introduce a new set of user inputs that Flutter will need to handle if it doesn't want its websites to just break if someone loads them up in a headset.

Currently as a web dev, if I want my website to be usable by a voice assistant, I don't have to do anything. If I want my website to be usable in VR, I don't have to think about it -- that's Chrome's problem, not mine, I just expose the exact same controls I've always used. If someone is building a user agent that interacts with my site in a novel way, as long as I've built my site well everything just kind of works, because of how the web is architectured.

But if you're rebuilding all of the controls from scratch, suddenly you can't think that way anymore. You have to think about the controls and gestures that every medium exposes, or else you have a website that just randomly breaks depending on what OS/platform a user accesses it from.

> and it's usually addressed by allowing native hooks

Not on the web though. I mean, for obvious reasons on the web we can't just expose native OS methods for websites to call. Flutter doesn't have a choice on that front, Google, Mozilla, and Apple realistically aren't going to break browser sandboxing just so the devs have an easier time.

Re: Flutter 2

#585

Post by themolecularman »

achow wrote: post #554
ryandrake wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

The blog exactly answers this. ------------------------ Google Pay switched to Flutter a few months ago for their flagship mobile app, and they already achieved major gains in productivity and quality. By unifying the codebase, the team removed feature disparity between platforms and eliminated over half a million lines of code. Google Pay also reports that their engineers are far more efficient, with a huge reductio…

> Google Pay switched to Flutter a few months ago for their flagship mobile app, and they already achieved major gains in productivity and quality.

I'm not sure about the quality. I'm bullish on Flutter but the iOS reviews for the app are awful.

Re: Flutter 2

#586

Post by sgerenser »

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…

At least you got the pizza demo to work at all. All I got was a large Qt logo with the message: Application exit (TypeError: undefined is not an object (evaluating 'handle[name]'))

Re: Flutter 2

#587

Post by danShumway »

mdoms wrote: post #529
heavyset_go wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand how breaking accessibility with Flutter wouldn't mean that companies that use it on the web are violating the ADA.

I don't know what that is but I assume it's some kind of American nonsense I don't care at all about.

I assume that you just haven't run into this specific term before, but if that's not the case then comments like these are why the web community overall should oppose web technologies that leave accessibility decisions solely up to end developers or that don't make accessible options the default.

The web works as well as it does because (in general) it's accessible by default. There are lots of open problems on the web regarding accessibility, but we should be moving towards being more accessible by default, not less -- because if we want a universally accessible app platform, developers and corporations can not be trusted to make these decisions on their own, and laws will only affect specific industries and countries.

That's part of why Flutter devs talking about dev decisions that can increase accessibility ring kind of hollow to me. Accessibility has to be something that's pushed at a technological and cultural level if we want the web to be a platform that leads the way forward on these issues.

Re: Flutter 2

#588

Post by higerordermap »

munificent wrote: post #569
tmpz22 wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because Google is focused on language and tooling development, but forgot to create a killer app example with publicly available source code. Show us a minor Google property re-done in Flutter with code examples and people would flock to it. But. They. Won't.

> forgot to create a killer app example with publicly available source code. Show us a minor Google property re-done in Flutter with code examples and people would flock to it. Can you think of a "minor Google property" that is open source?

Maybe some android utility that doesn't need Google integration.. Let's say calculator app from next android version?

Re: Flutter 2

#589

Post by birthday »

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,…

Just imagine trying to build a mobile startup company and having to write 2-3 copies of your app (Android, iOS, Desktop). No thanks!

Nobody needs native UI. It's time we get passed that!

Re: Flutter 2

#590

Post by SamBam »

unityByFreedom wrote: post #574
CGamesPlay wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, but the Flutter gallery has zero selectable text, as far as I can see. Seems like a great case of where developer decided "doesn't need selection, let's let the user drag to scroll with their mouse instead".

Why even make it a 50/50 choice? I hate apps without selectable text and they're everywhere. Translating something becomes a nightmare and that hurts useability. It's like if you made spoiler 50/50. Do you want to see this without clicking? I think we really overlook the thought that had gone into making js, and other open tech.

Exactly. And I didn't even realize how often I subconsciously select text while I read until I saw the relevant xkcd. [1]

I truly think my random clicking on paragraphs that I'm approaching isn't just ADHD but a way of helping my eyes stay on track. It's very disconcerting when the text doesn't select. (As, clearly, all these comments noticed as well -- why were we all trying to select the text? To check if it's Flash-ish, of course, but also we just like things to grab onto while we read.)

1. https://xkcd.com/1271/

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