Flutter looks good, but is painful • Hacker News Board

Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful

#61

Post by nnq » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 9:39 AM UTC

mstade wrote: post #55

nnq wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Sorry, but your linked source is off-topic, ancient (2013!), and compares the wrong things (native mobile apps vs. old-generation-hybrid-web-mobile apps).

The relevant comparison here would be between:

- (1) truly native uni-platform mobile apps (native Android and native iOS apps)

- (2) cross-platform mobile apps using native widgets (not sure if there's any alternative to React Native here)

- (3) cross-platform mobile apps that draw their own ui, but NOT using web technologies: Flutter is the only obvious example (there are older things like Kivy which uses Python and OpenGL but I think it was mostly used for games and kids app, not that popular)

Web-techs-based hybrid-mobile apps are a different thing (Cordova, Ionic etc.) and, yes, there everyone agreed they feel inferior to users, just as mobile optimized websites feel inferior.

Unfortunately this is the problem here, it's incredibly easy to compare apples to oranges here, I don't blame, just saying that all sources are misleading, probably it's better to play with few things and see the "gut feeling"... it's pretty obvious that underlying tech and whether the widgets are drawn natively or not is NEVER a differentiator between successful and unsuccessful apps, it's always all the other things :)

Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful

#62

Post by karma_fountain » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 9:40 AM UTC

mstade wrote: post #55

nnq wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

I gather they are saying web apps you use on your mobile verses apps you download to your phone. That's not really native versus non-native.

Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful

#63

Post by nnq » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 9:44 AM UTC

lovelearning wrote: post #23

I have a couple of android app PoCs in mind but didn't want to go down the Android SDK way which IMO is becoming more and more complicated and verbose with every release. Just tried Flutter and React-Native yesterday for the first time, and I'm sorry to say both were sorely disappointing. Flutter was easier to install and get working, but Dart seems to be as verbose as Java with some JavaScript style syntax mixed in.…

Yep, React Native has horrible dev experience... this is what drove me to Flutter. Dart may be ugly but after you get used to it it's mostly "Typescript done right" imo ;)

Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful

#64

Post by nnq » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 9:47 AM UTC

TylerE wrote: post #4

Is “one week of electric scooter rental in Bucharest” the new world currency?

...only if in the sense that money can get you killed :) Drivers aren't that friendly and attentive :P

Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful

#65

Post by 555513 » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 10:01 AM UTC

tobiaswk wrote: post #59

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 fra…

Those 1-star reviews on the Play Store are infuriating !

Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful

#66

Post by moksly » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 10:01 AM UTC

aikinai wrote: post #60

IshKebab wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Then why are Discord and Visual Studio Code both so popular and well liked by their users?

Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful

#67

Post by Const-me » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 10:01 AM UTC

pcr910303 wrote: post #32

Const-me wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Windows apps usually just re-invent all kinds of UI elements It wasn't always this way. Before Win8, most apps used native controls on Windows. When it became apparent GPU rendering is the way forward, MS re-implemented them in WPF. It does draw everything from scratch, because the backend is now DirectX 9. But it was a first party reimplementation, the UX is good. Then came Windows 8 and Windows 10, trying to conv…

> Before Win8, most apps used native controls on Windows. Yeah, it's true but the problem is that the native controls were very limited. There was no central notification system so every Windows messaging app reinvented notifications(unlike macOS which converged to Growl and later, the Notification Center), no standard Ribbon Menu widget (at least when it was first introduced, I'm not sure about the current status) s…

> There was no central notification system… no standard Ribbon Menu widget

True, but if MS wanted to, they could have added both to the old ecosystem, without jumping ship.

They had mayor parts of notification system already, Shell_NotifyIcon API from Shell32.dll. They were adding more features to NOTIFYICONDATA structure with every OS version.

They did release ribbon widget; it just took them a few years. Introduced in Office 2007, the widget is from Win7 i.e. 2009: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/windowsribbon...

Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful

#68

Post by karma_fountain » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 10:12 AM UTC

I've written one app in flutter and the experience was good. It was very easy to get started, and the dev experience was on par with web development with very fast hot reload.

However I would say where it excels at is in creating a fully custom-branded experience rather than sticking to the native elements. I reckon https://reflectly.app/ is the poster child for this.

Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful

#69

Post by zerr » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 10:20 AM UTC

Const-me wrote: post #67

pcr910303 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Before Win8, most apps used native controls on Windows. Yeah, it's true but the problem is that the native controls were very limited. There was no central notification system so every Windows messaging app reinvented notifications(unlike macOS which converged to Growl and later, the Notification Center), no standard Ribbon Menu widget (at least when it was first introduced, I'm not sure about the current status) s…

> There was no central notification system… no standard Ribbon Menu widget True, but if MS wanted to, they could have added both to the old ecosystem, without jumping ship. They had mayor parts of notification system already, Shell_NotifyIcon API from Shell32.dll. They were adding more features to NOTIFYICONDATA structure with every OS version. They did release ribbon widget; it just took them a few years. Introduced…

They (VS team) licensed the ribbon control from the 3rd party company. The Office team didn't share the original one with them :)

Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful

#70

Post by latchkey » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 10:36 AM UTC

sgt wrote: post #16

latchkey wrote: post #2

I've recently done a bit of Flutter development and have enjoyed it quite a bit. The third party Provider API solves all the state management issues, it should become the default. OP has some valid points for sure, but fact is that any framework is going to have issues. Just part of the game.

That sounds interesting. What would be the go to documentation for a good Provider API implementation (i.e. like a best practice guide with an example)?

The author isn't the best at documentation, but his code is excellent and he is very helpful if you ask nicely...

https://github.com/rrousselGit/provider