Announcing Flutter Release Preview 1
medium.com
Announcing Flutter Release Preview 1
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Re: Announcing Flutter Release Preview 1
#2I'd love to play with Flutter but issues like this keep me at arm's length. Hopefully when this kind of thing is finally resolved I'll be able to give it a closer look.
Re: Announcing Flutter Release Preview 1
#3I'd love to play with Flutter but issues like this keep me at arm's length. Hopefully when this kind of thing is finally resolved I'll be able to give it a closer look. https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/6827
State restoration pretty damn important too. Say for example, the user goes into multi-window on Android. If they were doing anything important on the screen, that would just be wiped out.
Re: Announcing Flutter Release Preview 1
#4I've been using Flutter for a few months now, and have not felt this productive in years. Being able to iterate so quickly on real or virtual devices has changed how I design and development a UI. I can set out with a mock-up and almost immediately start to feel why it isn't perfect and just use it until the feel is right. The productivity bonuses are sometimes hard to explain to people who haven't yet tried Flutter and it's tooling.
This announcement of preview 1 is coming at a great time as I am launching my first app on iOS and Android next week.
Re: Announcing Flutter Release Preview 1
#5Unfortunately, I kind of feel torn: On one hand, I love flutter as a concept[1]. It removes a lot of the baroque from mobile development (no need for the whole RecyclerViewer construction for every list! No Fragments! Doesn't require Android Studio to start working!) but I hate the language (dart). After using Kotlin (let alone Rust), It feels like moving back to Java (no non-nullable types) and in some ways it's actually worse than Java (threads are extremely heavy weight, every interaction with native code is async and slow).
I wish there was:
1. A good Kotlin language server (unlikely, as the company behind the language is an IDE company).
2. A good reactive Kotlin GUI library (meaning, with the ergonomics of Flutter (as in, I don't have to work with Fragments and their lifecycles, just use views)).
3. A good JVM interpreter (to speed up Kotlin/Java compilation)
[1]. No I don't use Flutter to "write two apps for the price of one", as most (of my) apps are just a front-end over a back-end server, so they don't have any special logic worth saving between iOS and Android. I just find Flutter easier to work with relative to Android.
Re: Announcing Flutter Release Preview 1
#6Unfortunately, I kind of feel torn: On one hand, I love flutter as a concept[1]. It removes a lot of the baroque from mobile development (no need for the whole RecyclerViewer construction for every list! No Fragments! Doesn't require Android Studio to start working!) but I hate the language (dart). After using Kotlin (let alone Rust), It feels like moving back to Java (no non-nullable types) and in some ways it's act…
I have a different view on it, I actually like Dart. I like the strong types and how the language is more suited for enterprise development than both typescript and JavaScript.
There is the added benefit of being able to reuse assets from your mobile app in AngularDart, which I suspect may see an increase in use along with flutter.
I’m not coming from Kotlin or rust though, but a .net core backend with JavaScript on the front end and Xamarin for apps. I can definitely see us move from AngularJS and Xamarin to flutter and AngularDart though as this move would be a nice improvement.
I’m not too worried about the lack of available projects and libraries on dart compared to say JS, as we typically wouldn’t include some one man hobby project anyway.
That being said, I think we’ll wait and see what happens throughout 2018.
Re: Announcing Flutter Release Preview 1
#7If they at least replaced @Override with override keyword, it is not like Dart had to deal with backwards compatibility of 5 language versions.
Re: Announcing Flutter Release Preview 1
#8As someone who has spent some time inside the Windows 10 environment working on UWP applications, I always thought that Xamarin would someday be my goto whenever I have the opportunity to dive into Mobile development.
I am comfortable with C# and I have always felt happy writing in XAML.
But looking into Flutter, I think it's undeniable how smart this project truly was. Even if it isn't backed by a popular programming language, since Dart obviously does not fall on that category.
Re: Announcing Flutter Release Preview 1
#9This release follows Airbnb posts describing their deep experience in React Native and why they ended up abandoning it:
https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/sunsetting-react-nativ...
Based on the issues they've had with React Native [1] I believe they would've had a better experience with Dart and Flutter which also has a fast iterative dev experience with a productive language that lets you build both iOS and Android Apps from a single code-base. But in contrast to RN, Dart 2 is statically typed and AOT compiled into native ARM which enables better performance and doesn't have any of the JS VM issues Airbnb kept running into. I also prefer Flutter's x-plat approach of drawing all their widgets with Skia as it also mitigates the UI widget inconsistencies they would've had if they tried to wrap native widgets. Flutter widgets follow Material design by default but can also be themed to look like native iOS widgets (https://flutter.io/widgets/cupertino/).
React Native nails the development experience but is plagued with issues which isn't clear if it's because it's architecturally flawed or that it's just poorly resourced and Facebook only cares about resolving their own issues.
I've been burnt by the lack of support in React Native indiscriminately closing issues, which stopped me from wasting my time reporting any more issues and eventually stopped using React Native altogether.
I've been pleasantly surprised by Flutter, it does what it says on the tin, enables a productive dev environment for creating Native Apps from a single code-base and in contrast to my RN experience their support has been stellar, several team members responded to my queries immediately with solutions and workarounds.
The biggest issue I've run into coming from JS/RN is not being able to use reflection due to iOS's AOT restrictions for which you'll need to use code-gen to workaround. Also I prefer JSX for designing UIs, whilst Dart's object declarations enable a kind of code DSL it's not as composable as using a declarative XML markup where you can freely move widgets around to design UIs. Ultimately I hope they provide a similar language feature for using an XML-like markup as an alternative for (and just transpiles to) object declarations.
[1] https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/react-native-at-airbnb-the-technology-dafd0b43838#4b2bRe: Announcing Flutter Release Preview 1
#10I've been using flutter now for a few months and I love the workflow I can get in, quickly iterating and seeing the changes immediately. A side effect of the hot reloading I found is that I am able to build quickly and not worry about the style until later because I know changing the style is relatively easy and quick to iterate on itself.
If you use VSCode, it really is a first class citizen, which makes me happy as I am most familiar with that editor.
Overall I haven't been this happy with development in a while.