Initial experience creating cross-platform apps with Flutter and Dart
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Re: Initial experience creating cross-platform apps with Flutter and Dart
#2> So Flutter is actually pushing pixels itself, sounds strange, but it works
The siren song of cross-platform development sounds so sweet to the ears and I've fallen for it quite a few times only to get bitten in the end. Introducing another layer between you and the source has several drawbacks: it's an additional source for bugs, it makes you reliant on the middle man to be timely with updates to keep pace of the native changes and bug fixes, it can prevent you from using time-saving tooling for the native environment, etc.
What happens when the native controls change? What do I see when I'm running an older native version?
Re: Initial experience creating cross-platform apps with Flutter and Dart
#3> So Flutter is actually pushing pixels itself, sounds strange, but it works The siren song of cross-platform development sounds so sweet to the ears and I've fallen for it quite a few times only to get bitten in the end. Introducing another layer between you and the source has several drawbacks: it's an additional source for bugs, it makes you reliant on the middle man to be timely with updates to keep pace of the n…
Yeah, been there, done that.
The problem with building your own UI toolkit is that you can never make it feel native. You can get 90% there, but it always feels a bit off to the user. The more you make things look like native controls, the more users expect them to act like native controls and tiny differences get amplified.
Re: Initial experience creating cross-platform apps with Flutter and Dart
#4> So Flutter is actually pushing pixels itself, sounds strange, but it works The siren song of cross-platform development sounds so sweet to the ears and I've fallen for it quite a few times only to get bitten in the end. Introducing another layer between you and the source has several drawbacks: it's an additional source for bugs, it makes you reliant on the middle man to be timely with updates to keep pace of the n…
Yeah, been there, done that. The problem with building your own UI toolkit is that you can never make it feel native. You can get 90% there, but it always feels a bit off to the user. The more you make things look like native controls, the more users expect them to act like native controls and tiny differences get amplified.
You're also only going to get any of the perceived benefits of the choice to build a custom UI kit if you're only solving the same problems that the framework authors were solving.
If you suddenly need, as an example that I've come across, a list of stats to update with a high tick rate which is unusual in an app so no one optimises for it you'll likely find you're no longer anywhere near a native experience.
I know that's not a unique problem with opinionated frameworks, but it's usually a programming issue to solve in the background, not a deal-breaker due to how every customer suffers.
Re: Initial experience creating cross-platform apps with Flutter and Dart
#5I think the article would have been much better if the author had left out the section about RN. Failing that I would have liked to see him dig into why RN was slow for his use case and what he tried to do to fix theses issues.
"While it uses the same React paradigm, there’s still a lot of differences.It seems performance is reduced significantly as your application and the react framework is controlling all the high level rendering functions from within a JavaScript control thread."
It really seems like this person didn't spend a lot of time looking into performance when assessing React Native. Facebook have some really nice docs on this:
https://facebook.github.io/react-native/docs/performance.htm...
They have a whole section on how to handle performance for user interactions/animations/etc which is well worth reading. Many RN related performance issues boil down to not being mindful of how javascript interacts with the native bridge. Tal Kol from Wix wrote a really great article about this, which you can find here:
https://hackernoon.com/moving-beyond-animations-to-user-inte...
I'm sure Flutter/Dart are great tools. It's just a little odd to see someone who know's React dismiss RN off handedly for performance reasons without making much of an effort to read the developer docs.
Re: Initial experience creating cross-platform apps with Flutter and Dart
#6> So Flutter is actually pushing pixels itself, sounds strange, but it works The siren song of cross-platform development sounds so sweet to the ears and I've fallen for it quite a few times only to get bitten in the end. Introducing another layer between you and the source has several drawbacks: it's an additional source for bugs, it makes you reliant on the middle man to be timely with updates to keep pace of the n…
> The siren song of cross-platform development sounds so sweet to the ears and I've fallen for it quite a few times only to get bitten in the end.
Indeed it is the much harder road to travel. It all depends on who is developing the platform however. Google can pull it off, which is why Flutter is worth considering.
Re: Initial experience creating cross-platform apps with Flutter and Dart
#7> So Flutter is actually pushing pixels itself, sounds strange, but it works The siren song of cross-platform development sounds so sweet to the ears and I've fallen for it quite a few times only to get bitten in the end. Introducing another layer between you and the source has several drawbacks: it's an additional source for bugs, it makes you reliant on the middle man to be timely with updates to keep pace of the n…
Another issue is when your customer (or boss) ask you for this very simple feature that's found everywhere ( because it's a native sdk feature) and you suddenly realize you'll have the spend days if not weeks implementing it. I wouldn't be surprised if maps weren't as powerful in flutter as in native android or ios sdk for a long time.
Still, i think the "low level / pixel level" approach that flutter took is the only one that makes sense. You can't abstract away GUI layers like the android one or the iOS one. it's just way too big, and they are themselves trying to abstract away discrepancies between OS versions. I don't understand how could anyone expect to get something of professional quality with a layer on top, knowing how hard it is to get it right even with the default tools.
They are taking on a gargantuan task though..
Re: Initial experience creating cross-platform apps with Flutter and Dart
#8Some implementation features related to a few points in comments here so far, from Flutter faq here: https://flutter.io/faq/
How does Flutter run my code on Android?
The engine’s C/C++ code is compiled with Android’s NDK, and the majority of the framework and application code is running as native code compiled by the Dart compiler.
How does Flutter run my code on iOS?
The engine’s C/C++ code is compiled with LLVM, and any Dart code is AOT-compiled into native code. The app runs using the native instruction set (no interpreter is involved).
Does Flutter use my system’s OEM widgets?
No. Instead, Flutter provides a set of widgets (including Material Design and Cupertino (iOS-styled) widgets), managed and rendered by Flutter’s framework and engine. You can browse a catalog of Flutter’s widgets.
We are hoping the end-result will be higher quality apps. If we reused the OEM widgets, the quality and performance of Flutter apps would be limited by the quality of those widgets.
In Android, for example, there’s a hard-coded set of gestures and fixed rules for disambiguating them. In Flutter, you can write your own gesture recognizer that is a first-class participant in the gesture system. Moreover, two widgets authored by different people can coordinate to disambiguate gestures.
Modern app design trends point towards designers and users wanting more motion-rich UIs and brand-first designs. In order to achieve that level of customized, beautiful design, Flutter is architectured to drive pixels instead of the OEM widgets.
By using the same renderer, framework, and set of widgets, we make it easier to publish for both iOS and Android concurrently, without having to do careful and costly planning to align two separate codebases and feature sets.
By using a single language, a single framework, and a single set of libraries for all of your UI (regardless if your UI is different for each mobile platform or largely consistent), we also aim to help lower app development and maintenance costs.
What happens when my mobile OS updates and introduces new widgets?
The Flutter team watches the adoption and demand for new mobile widgets from iOS and Android, and aims to work with the community to build support for new widgets. This work may come in the form of lower-level framework features, new composable widgets, or new widget implementations.
Flutter’s layered architecture is designed to support numerous widget libraries, and we encourage and support the community in building and maintaining widget libraries.
What happens when my mobile OS updates and introduces new platform capabilities?
Flutter’s interop and plugin system is designed to allow developers to access new mobile OS features and capabilities immediately. Developers don’t have to wait for the Flutter team to expose the new mobile OS capability.
Re: Initial experience creating cross-platform apps with Flutter and Dart
#9I'm amazed at the number of original projects i see done with Dart. Yet it always seems to be ambitious prototypes as if the language was still looking for its "ruby on rail" moment.
Not that there would be anything wrong with that, but when you combine this impression with reading titles like "google coding its next OS with dart", you wonder if this language is google's secret weapon, or if all of it is just a marketing attempt.
Re: Initial experience creating cross-platform apps with Flutter and Dart
#10Some implementation features related to a few points in comments here so far, from Flutter faq here: https://flutter.io/faq/ How does Flutter run my code on Android? The engine’s C/C++ code is compiled with Android’s NDK, and the majority of the framework and application code is running as native code compiled by the Dart compiler. How does Flutter run my code on iOS? The engine’s C/C++ code is compiled with LLVM, an…
thanks for that, i completely missed the interop and plugin part.
Although i doubt this approach would work with something like "iOS 11 new navigation bar" that's really integrated to all the rest.