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We're forking Flutter

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Re: We're forking Flutter

#671

Post by pandeiro »

refulgentis wrote: post #159
ignoramous wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flutter in Kotlin instead of Dart would have killed ! Alas. Hopefully, Kotlin Multi-Platform holds up as good as Flutter has (the rendering architecture based on Skia seems similar between the two frameworks).

Yes, I agree, trying to use Kotlin instead of Dart would have killed Flutter. I've been hearing about Kotlin multiplatform just as long as flutter, and writing Kotlin since 2019. Kotlin is a horrible daily driver. I worked on Android for Google at 7 years, and maybe it'd have a better chance if it didn't win internally. As it stands, there's too many organizational boundaries created, and each organization holds itse…

There's no hot reload in Android (kotlin) dev? Wow

Re: We're forking Flutter

#672

Post by kbcool »

divan wrote: post #612
madeofpalk wrote: post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are some examples of good 'impossible to tell' UIs built with flutter on mobile?

Bolt [1] and Bolt Food [2], for example. One of the apps is built with Flutter, another one is native. Can you tell which one and explain how you noticed it? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3X8COSnscbQ [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOgrdt5WQcI [2]

LOL Bolt is a React Native shop.

Just Google "bolt react native" they have jobs and articles about their usage but also any library inspector will tell you that.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#673

Post by wiseowise »

mdaniel wrote: post #666
wiseowise wrote: post #639

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Android Studio is subsidized by Google and works pretty much only Android. The moment you have to work something more, e.g. some Web stuff you need to pay for IntelliJ Ultimate as it’s only IDE that supports Kotlin. They even have Ktor (Kotlin web framework) plugin available only in Ultimate. For any non-trivial Kotlin development you need to have Ultimate.

> you need to pay for IntelliJ Ultimate as it’s only IDE that supports Kotlin. That is so stunningly false that I am pretty sure I'm feeding the trolls: https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community/blob/idea/24... (Apache 2)

Right. Good luck developing Kotlin multiplatform, Ktor, Spring, anything web related or native with Intellij community.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#674

Post by refulgentis »

pandeiro wrote: post #671
refulgentis wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I agree, trying to use Kotlin instead of Dart would have killed Flutter. I've been hearing about Kotlin multiplatform just as long as flutter, and writing Kotlin since 2019. Kotlin is a horrible daily driver. I worked on Android for Google at 7 years, and maybe it'd have a better chance if it didn't win internally. As it stands, there's too many organizational boundaries created, and each organization holds itse…

There's no hot reload in Android (kotlin) dev? Wow

yeah, it fascinates me - both Apple and Google started these new UI framework things after Flutter, and both didn't land it, but instead, landed some half-baked thing where individual components can render live in the IDE.

That may sound more useful than it is: think "oh I can specify a dummy title and subtitle for a list view cell in code, then open a special pane in the ide to preview a source file, and then resize the window to imitate different screen sizes!", not, oh there's a bug, fix, save, insta-reload, verified fix. No holistic screens, or loading info from a database, or mutating data.

I assume this is an extremely hard problem. I remember trying to get Obj-C hot reload working 15 years ago and it kinda half-worked some of the time. And its not like I can edit the C++ my Flutter app is linking against and get instareload.

But still, it's one of the things thats easy to point out and drives home that these once-a-decade-or-two frameworks started in response to React Native/Flutter aren't addressing the fundamentals of what made them a sea change. Industry is risk averse and we make too many decisions similar to staying on track to launch MacOS 9.110 in 2024, instead of biting the bullet to get OS X done.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#675

Post by kbcool »

thiht wrote: post #592

> How many Flutter developers exist in the world, today? My guess is that it's on the order of 1,000,000 developers. I have a hard time taking this number seriously, that sounds grossly exaggerated. Are there parts of the world where people actually use Flutter? Even their showcase is pretty light and a bit deceptive.

It's probably within an order of magnitude but it's really just hobbyists, casuals and indies using it.

If you compare it to React Native there probably are more Flutter apps published but if you drill down into the top 1000 on each app store you would be lucky to find more than a few in most countries using Flutter whereas React Native definitely makes up more than 10%, maybe as high as 30% of non-game apps. I know on my phone I have zero Flutter based apps installed and almost 20% use React Native in some way.

Source: I'm an app developer so I keep an eye on these things.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#676

Post by divan »

kbcool wrote: post #672
divan wrote: post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bolt [1] and Bolt Food [2], for example. One of the apps is built with Flutter, another one is native. Can you tell which one and explain how you noticed it? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3X8COSnscbQ [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOgrdt5WQcI [2]

LOL Bolt is a React Native shop. Just Google "bolt react native" they have jobs and articles about their usage but also any library inspector will tell you that.

Nope, one of them is Flutter (I know team PM personally). Which one?

Re: We're forking Flutter

#677

Post by kelnos »

divan wrote: post #233
deergomoo wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most people don't realize how many apps written in Flutter they use daily, simply because it's impossible to tell You can't be serious. Maybe on Android, but on other platforms—especially iOS—they stick out like a sore thumb. A number of them just look like Material Design Android apps awkwardly transplanted over, but I know that's down to the developer so I won't hold that against Flutter. But scrolling through th…

Sure, but not every cross-platform app developer wants their app to look "native to iOS". Especially if you want your app to look the same on all platforms and/or have some creative design.

As an on-again off-again (currently off-again) cross-platform app developer, I always want my app to look like it fits in with the rest of the apps on whatever platform it's deployed to.

As a user, I hate it when some app developer thinks they're cute and wants to skin an app differently or draw their own ad-hoc widgets.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#678

Post by [deleted] »

insin wrote: post #635
jamil7 wrote: post #628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I noticed the SNCF Connect app for France's rail was using it in their showcase which explains why the scroll views are so weird and busted feeling. They still stutter on a new iPhone. As a native iOS developer I'm somewhat biased and a lot of people likely don't care but it still feels off to me even for apps that use a complete custom design. I hope they can optmise away those kind of issues more as it's IMO always…

You still have to deal with the Android build system, `flutter new` just generates initial config for it and all the other necessary metadata (and that config can change between versions - I ended up manually diffing the generated stuff against a new app every time I upgraded). At some point I made the mistake of not touching the code for too long and upgrading Android Studio when suggested, and I was never able to (…

[deleted]

Re: We're forking Flutter

#679

Post by eternityforest »

deergomoo wrote: post #215
divan wrote: post #120

> We describe Flock as "Flutter+". In other words, we do not want, or intend, to fork the Flutter community. Flock will remain constantly up to date with Flutter. That was the first fear when I saw the title - splitting community and having two incompatible versions. Good to see it addressed in the post. The second was just a fear of how it would complicate the development process, but it seems to be a drop-in replac…

> Most people don't realize how many apps written in Flutter they use daily, simply because it's impossible to tell You can't be serious. Maybe on Android, but on other platforms—especially iOS—they stick out like a sore thumb. A number of them just look like Material Design Android apps awkwardly transplanted over, but I know that's down to the developer so I won't hold that against Flutter. But scrolling through th…

On non-mac platforms material is already everywhere so they mostly don't look too out of place.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#680

Post by eternityforest »

jwells89 wrote: post #314
divan wrote: post #120

> We describe Flock as "Flutter+". In other words, we do not want, or intend, to fork the Flutter community. Flock will remain constantly up to date with Flutter. That was the first fear when I saw the title - splitting community and having two incompatible versions. Good to see it addressed in the post. The second was just a fear of how it would complicate the development process, but it seems to be a drop-in replac…

I can’t imagine using Flutter for desktop development if only because like most newer UI frameworks, it’s mobile focused and doesn’t come with important desktop widgets like tableviews/datagrids and treeviews.

Tableviews are pretty niche and tree views mostly get used for files, so I'm fine not having either in apps that aren't about managing lots of data.

I like headers and sections more that tables for most things anyway.

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