6 ms·

Flutter will change everything, and is an excellent choice for iOS development

54 points by yannikyeo 8y ago

akmarinov 8y ago
How is it better than RN though (haven’t read much about it)? Can it overtake RN? Why would I learn Dart when JS is more widespread and a better investment?
- enyo 8y ago
  Because Dart is similar to JS, easy to learn, and better in regards to performance, tools and security. JS is a mess, just look at the equality operators and the fact that you can manipulate classes like String, etc...
- k__ 8y ago
  I don't know. Seems like astro-turfing to me. Dart isn't much better than JS (as TS or Reason are) so switching doesn't give you too much gains, but a smaller eco-system. Also, the canvas approach of Flutter feels kinda backwards. I think it's artifically hyped by Google. React will be much simpler with hooks and the RN updates will improve native inter-op. But yeah, that's just my take and I'm often wrong with predictions xD
- curyous 8y ago
  The release version runs native code, so is faster and uses less power.
  - akmarinov 8y ago
    But RN also compiles to native code? How’s it different?
IloveHN84 8y ago
But why the author focuses a lot on Apple? He clearly forgot about the % of users from Android and Windows platforms, which are at lease 2 orders of magnitude bigger, compared to Apple.
- htkibar 8y ago
  For mobile, windows does not exist. Android? It is owned by Google anyways.
- heisenbit 8y ago
  As others have pointed out, there seems to be a marketing push. To deliver on ones promise of a blog post with impact the most simplest solution is to use "Apple", particularly as XCode is a convenient bogyman.
- starsinspace 8y ago
  2 orders of magnitude? Apple recently announced that there are now 100 million active Mac users. Two orders of magnitude more would be 10 billion.. given the number of humans on earth, I really don't think there are that many Windows users. And the iOS platform is bigger than the Mac..
- curyous 8y ago
  Are you sure about that? Last I saw, there are more iOS users than Windows users now.
kgraves 8y ago
What irks me the most is React Native's stability. RN hasn't even reached 1.0 and I have been concerned about the war stories of Udacity[1] and Airbnb[2] moving away from RN. Last time I checked out Flutter a year ago it was in alpha, now it's reached 1.0 perhaps I might give it try... Has anyone with experience in React Native tried out Flutter/Dart be willing to share their experience and challenges? [1] https://engineering.udacity.com/react-native-a-retrospective-from-the-mobile-engineering-team-at-udacity-89975d6a8102?gi=48bcba631a95 https://engineering.udacity.com/react-native-a-retrospective... [2] https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/sunsetting-react-native-1868ba28e30a https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/sunsetting-react-nativ...
- htkibar 8y ago
  There are two things to consider; 1. Version numbers are not that much of an indication to stability. RN is much more battle-tested. 2. Udacity and AirBnB both have been using React Native in a "use the bad parts" fashion. (Specifically, they have been using it with an existing app instead of from scratch). It is not really fair to React Native to be honest. However one thing from Udacity is quite fair, RN is much worse on Android in comparison to iOS. I think giving it a try and having something new in your toolset is a nice idea. However, I doubt Flutter will be "RN is dead long live the new RN". Finally, I really don't trust Google not to axe this project too on a spite. However that might be more personal so keep it out of the equation.
  - pvinis 8y ago
    I wanted to write exactly what you wrote, plus this: AirBnB and other similar big companies, can "afford" to let go of react native because they have enough resources to make their own way of working. Specifically AirBnB have their own layout engine. React native is very very good and usable. But trying to integrate it with your own tools is up to you since Facebook and the community don't have access to that private lib that someone might have. That is what make some of these companies drop RN. I think it's important to understand that, and not just keep the title "X dropped RN" and think "oh it must suck then". I've seen many people do that and it's unfair.
  - 8y ago
andrekandre 8y ago
what is up with all of these flutter articles on medium recently proclaiming that flutter is the second coming of app dev tools or something... almost like it was some kind of social media strategy... personally i find flutter interesting, but i don’t like that, hot reloading is for ui only, and the “pyramid of doom” style inline coding isn’t my cup of tea...
- rahiche 8y ago
  hot reload is not just for UI
- 75dvtwin 8y ago
  Seems like an organized PR campaign, hidden behind developer blog posts. I was recently replying to a similar thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18629385 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18629385 I wish these tactics of subliminal agenda pushes, would stop already. https://chasegage.wordpress.com/2018/01/23/american-politics-the-agenda-setting-theory-and-the-new-england-patriots-propaganda-in-the-entertainment-industry/ https://chasegage.wordpress.com/2018/01/23/american-politics...
  - sidcool 8y ago
    There's no conspiracy. Flutter is new, it's from Google and it's growing fast. Hence people are trying it out and blogging about it. Others are intrigued and reading the blogs and liking it. That's it.
  - Apocryphon 8y ago
    If anything, astroturfing in tech blogs is probably less likely to be corporate funded, and more to be the sort of breathless SEO self-promotion from savvy self-marketers. Content creators on Medium, YouTube, Quora will latch onto any new tech in order to drive views, regardless of what tech it is.
- pxtail 8y ago
  Probably someone at google decided that fb gains too much influence over developers minds via Reac/ReactNative so they decided to make their own flavor and now they are just pumping some serious money into marketing.
alexandernst 8y ago
Not going to happen. Google will abandon Flutter in less than 5 years, as it has done will all the rest of the projects...
- kgraves 8y ago
  The difference with other Google projects is that Flutter is open source[1][2], one can fork it and continue the project if Google decides not to work on it anymore. [1] https://github.com/flutter https://github.com/flutter [2] https://github.com/flutter/flutter https://github.com/flutter/flutter
  - jmull 8y ago
    One could. But let's suppose Google provides the contributors making up the bulk of the people with key responsibilities on the project for five years and then decides to withdraw them. It's possible for the project to continue and be healthy, but you are going to face a large disruption. You're suddenly going to need to fill a lot of key positions -- developers, designers, managers, etc. The direction of the project could change radically as the new people controlling the project don't share the same vision for it as the old ones. All-in-all, it is likely to prove fatal or cause a radical transformation, and the resources for enhancements are likely to be much more modest.
  - rhinoceraptor 8y ago
    Open source won't save you if you write your app in a framework that's deprecated and no good developers want to touch it (see also: Angular 1).
  - xenihn 8y ago
    I think we'd see the same thing that happened with Parse after Facebook stopped supporting it. I.e. the vast majority of people who were previously using it would stop, despite continued maintenance by an open source community.
- forgot-my-pw 8y ago
  It's an open source software, not an API service.
firemelt 8y ago
Have use it my gut thinking its still a long way for flutter to become pratically usable, heck even their tutorial still doesnt have state manager tutorial, and not even mention the weird way of typing dart code/widget things
mamcx 8y ago
It clearly have discovered the phase1 of cross-platform UI toolkits. Is a beautiful dream... at that stage...
- specialist 8y ago
  Mayflies. I think "Galaxy" was the name of the first commercial cross platform UI library I used. Back when ClearCase was the hot new thing. I remember starting out so excited. That didn't last. While a brief search shows no trace of "Galaxy", I did find this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_platform-independent_GUI_libraries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_platform-independent_G...
andrewmcwatters 8y ago
Two things: One: If this is the best Flutter has to offer, it needs to go back to the drawing board. It's too verbose. 20 lines for a custom app bar. 7 lines for a contact list title. An entire page? Good lord, 24 lines. The only part it got right was the data-driven-esque portion at lines 66-76. Most UI development should look like this. But if you're telling me I need to write imperative code to set padding, much like the article complains about, you're wasting my time. In fact, most of the code shown here is imperative. It's not declarative in any sense. The entirety of the ViewController definition is imperative. I've written UIs my entire career. Entire career. This isn't progress. It's why teenagers are having so much fun with web technologies, and in my adult years I've been dying to see something come out and replace them. Two: You need an answer to the visual formatting model [1]. Yeah, you know, the W3C recommendation from 2011, which practically speaking has existed since '09, and frankly before that, CSS1 was great for a majority of work. Facebook's answer was Yoga. Great, but that's only the beginning. Most UI examples seem innocent enough when you're providing samples only a few hundreds of lines of code long. But codebases are filled with these things into the 10s and 100s of thousands of lines of code, and all too often that's literally only for positioning elements around. Separate from this, you need event logic in entirely separate files. Yeah, I know it's not really how people do things in React these days, but it's a hard step backwards. I firmly believe this. It's another reason why people are holding on to Vue, which, granted you can put an entire component's code in one file, but eventually you will really, really, not want this. You'll eventually want to think of things in classical styling separate from logic, and logic from layout, which all coincidentally have been in place with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for decades. Apple isn't the target. They're a non-player. WHATWG and W3C are. Anything else is acting like an athlete trying to compete with an old man. [1]: https://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/visuren.html https://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/visuren.html
- sebe 8y ago
  Interesting thing is Flutter was started as an experiment by guys on the chrome team, Ian Hickson, co-editor of the CSS 2.1 spec, works on Flutter as a TL. An aim of the Flutter team is to improve the developer experience. Google uses a design pattern to helps to separate presentation from business logic, this allows them to share code across flutter and the web. https://pub.dartlang.org/packages/bloc https://pub.dartlang.org/packages/bloc Here is the design bit from Flutter 1.0 live stream. https://youtu.be/NQ5HVyqg1Qc?t=5940 https://youtu.be/NQ5HVyqg1Qc?t=5940
xenihn 8y ago
I'm a native iOS dev, and I've found the following two tools extremely useful in lieu of native hot reload: https://github.com/johnno1962/InjectionIII https://github.com/johnno1962/InjectionIII (does not work with storyboards) https://sherlock.inspiredcode.io https://sherlock.inspiredcode.io
draw_down 8y ago
With UI, the devil is always, always, always in the details. Always.
mttyng 8y ago
I was recently introduced to https://expo.io/ https://expo.io/, which, while seeming more flexible (I don't even need to plug my device in to my machine) for app development, seems to have severe limitations for Native APIs. I couldn't find anything explicit -as far as a quick search went- for Flutter's limitations. Does anyone have experience with it enough to point them out?
- therockhead 8y ago
  >I don't even need to plug my device in to my machine This is common for most mobile development including Flutter.
  - mttyng 8y ago
    Oh, okay. I'm not a mobile developer. I've just started to get my feet wet with it. One of its (expo's) other selling points is "over the air" updates, meaning a user doesn't have to go through the respective app stores. I thought that was a thing with RN too, but I'm not sure.
    - madebysquares 8y ago
      Expo is excellent for developing in RN. The best thing is being able to send the app to other users without needing to install anything outside of the expo app. I just started digging into flutter last week so I don’t have a an opinion yet.
Nelkins 8y ago
Hot reload is such a productive feature for anything related to app/GUI development. Been playing around with a project called Fabulous (F# cross-platform app development)[0] and it's been a ton of fun. Here's a cool example of the hot-reloading in action[1]. [0] https://fsprojects.github.io/Fabulous/ https://fsprojects.github.io/Fabulous/ [1] https://twitter.com/JasonImison/status/1072074268333228032 https://twitter.com/JasonImison/status/1072074268333228032

54 points by yannikyeo 8y ago

How is it better than RN though (haven’t read much about it)? Can it overtake RN? Why would I learn Dart when JS is more widespread and a better investment?

enyo 8y ago
Because Dart is similar to JS, easy to learn, and better in regards to performance, tools and security. JS is a mess, just look at the equality operators and the fact that you can manipulate classes like String, etc...
k__ 8y ago
I don't know. Seems like astro-turfing to me. Dart isn't much better than JS (as TS or Reason are) so switching doesn't give you too much gains, but a smaller eco-system. Also, the canvas approach of Flutter feels kinda backwards. I think it's artifically hyped by Google. React will be much simpler with hooks and the RN updates will improve native inter-op. But yeah, that's just my take and I'm often wrong with predictions xD
curyous 8y ago
The release version runs native code, so is faster and uses less power.
- akmarinov 8y ago
  But RN also compiles to native code? How’s it different?

IloveHN84 8y ago

But why the author focuses a lot on Apple? He clearly forgot about the % of users from Android and Windows platforms, which are at lease 2 orders of magnitude bigger, compared to Apple.

htkibar 8y ago
For mobile, windows does not exist. Android? It is owned by Google anyways.
heisenbit 8y ago
As others have pointed out, there seems to be a marketing push. To deliver on ones promise of a blog post with impact the most simplest solution is to use "Apple", particularly as XCode is a convenient bogyman.
starsinspace 8y ago
2 orders of magnitude? Apple recently announced that there are now 100 million active Mac users. Two orders of magnitude more would be 10 billion.. given the number of humans on earth, I really don't think there are that many Windows users. And the iOS platform is bigger than the Mac..
curyous 8y ago
Are you sure about that? Last I saw, there are more iOS users than Windows users now.

kgraves 8y ago

What irks me the most is React Native's stability. RN hasn't even reached 1.0 and I have been concerned about the war stories of Udacity[1] and Airbnb[2] moving away from RN. Last time I checked out Flutter a year ago it was in alpha, now it's reached 1.0 perhaps I might give it try... Has anyone with experience in React Native tried out Flutter/Dart be willing to share their experience and challenges? [1] https://engineering.udacity.com/react-native-a-retrospective-from-the-mobile-engineering-team-at-udacity-89975d6a8102?gi=48bcba631a95 https://engineering.udacity.com/react-native-a-retrospective... [2] https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/sunsetting-react-native-1868ba28e30a https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/sunsetting-react-nativ...

htkibar 8y ago
There are two things to consider; 1. Version numbers are not that much of an indication to stability. RN is much more battle-tested. 2. Udacity and AirBnB both have been using React Native in a "use the bad parts" fashion. (Specifically, they have been using it with an existing app instead of from scratch). It is not really fair to React Native to be honest. However one thing from Udacity is quite fair, RN is much worse on Android in comparison to iOS. I think giving it a try and having something new in your toolset is a nice idea. However, I doubt Flutter will be "RN is dead long live the new RN". Finally, I really don't trust Google not to axe this project too on a spite. However that might be more personal so keep it out of the equation.
- pvinis 8y ago
  I wanted to write exactly what you wrote, plus this: AirBnB and other similar big companies, can "afford" to let go of react native because they have enough resources to make their own way of working. Specifically AirBnB have their own layout engine. React native is very very good and usable. But trying to integrate it with your own tools is up to you since Facebook and the community don't have access to that private lib that someone might have. That is what make some of these companies drop RN. I think it's important to understand that, and not just keep the title "X dropped RN" and think "oh it must suck then". I've seen many people do that and it's unfair.
- 8y ago

andrekandre 8y ago

what is up with all of these flutter articles on medium recently proclaiming that flutter is the second coming of app dev tools or something... almost like it was some kind of social media strategy... personally i find flutter interesting, but i don’t like that, hot reloading is for ui only, and the “pyramid of doom” style inline coding isn’t my cup of tea...

rahiche 8y ago
hot reload is not just for UI
75dvtwin 8y ago
Seems like an organized PR campaign, hidden behind developer blog posts. I was recently replying to a similar thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18629385 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18629385 I wish these tactics of subliminal agenda pushes, would stop already. https://chasegage.wordpress.com/2018/01/23/american-politics-the-agenda-setting-theory-and-the-new-england-patriots-propaganda-in-the-entertainment-industry/ https://chasegage.wordpress.com/2018/01/23/american-politics...
- sidcool 8y ago
  There's no conspiracy. Flutter is new, it's from Google and it's growing fast. Hence people are trying it out and blogging about it. Others are intrigued and reading the blogs and liking it. That's it.
- Apocryphon 8y ago
  If anything, astroturfing in tech blogs is probably less likely to be corporate funded, and more to be the sort of breathless SEO self-promotion from savvy self-marketers. Content creators on Medium, YouTube, Quora will latch onto any new tech in order to drive views, regardless of what tech it is.
pxtail 8y ago
Probably someone at google decided that fb gains too much influence over developers minds via Reac/ReactNative so they decided to make their own flavor and now they are just pumping some serious money into marketing.

alexandernst 8y ago

Not going to happen. Google will abandon Flutter in less than 5 years, as it has done will all the rest of the projects...

kgraves 8y ago
The difference with other Google projects is that Flutter is open source[1][2], one can fork it and continue the project if Google decides not to work on it anymore. [1] https://github.com/flutter https://github.com/flutter [2] https://github.com/flutter/flutter https://github.com/flutter/flutter
- jmull 8y ago
  One could. But let's suppose Google provides the contributors making up the bulk of the people with key responsibilities on the project for five years and then decides to withdraw them. It's possible for the project to continue and be healthy, but you are going to face a large disruption. You're suddenly going to need to fill a lot of key positions -- developers, designers, managers, etc. The direction of the project could change radically as the new people controlling the project don't share the same vision for it as the old ones. All-in-all, it is likely to prove fatal or cause a radical transformation, and the resources for enhancements are likely to be much more modest.
- rhinoceraptor 8y ago
  Open source won't save you if you write your app in a framework that's deprecated and no good developers want to touch it (see also: Angular 1).
- xenihn 8y ago
  I think we'd see the same thing that happened with Parse after Facebook stopped supporting it. I.e. the vast majority of people who were previously using it would stop, despite continued maintenance by an open source community.
forgot-my-pw 8y ago
It's an open source software, not an API service.

firemelt 8y ago

Have use it my gut thinking its still a long way for flutter to become pratically usable, heck even their tutorial still doesnt have state manager tutorial, and not even mention the weird way of typing dart code/widget things

mamcx 8y ago

It clearly have discovered the phase1 of cross-platform UI toolkits. Is a beautiful dream... at that stage...

specialist 8y ago
Mayflies. I think "Galaxy" was the name of the first commercial cross platform UI library I used. Back when ClearCase was the hot new thing. I remember starting out so excited. That didn't last. While a brief search shows no trace of "Galaxy", I did find this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_platform-independent_GUI_libraries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_platform-independent_G...

andrewmcwatters 8y ago

Two things: One: If this is the best Flutter has to offer, it needs to go back to the drawing board. It's too verbose. 20 lines for a custom app bar. 7 lines for a contact list title. An entire page? Good lord, 24 lines. The only part it got right was the data-driven-esque portion at lines 66-76. Most UI development should look like this. But if you're telling me I need to write imperative code to set padding, much like the article complains about, you're wasting my time. In fact, most of the code shown here is imperative. It's not declarative in any sense. The entirety of the ViewController definition is imperative. I've written UIs my entire career. Entire career. This isn't progress. It's why teenagers are having so much fun with web technologies, and in my adult years I've been dying to see something come out and replace them. Two: You need an answer to the visual formatting model [1]. Yeah, you know, the W3C recommendation from 2011, which practically speaking has existed since '09, and frankly before that, CSS1 was great for a majority of work. Facebook's answer was Yoga. Great, but that's only the beginning. Most UI examples seem innocent enough when you're providing samples only a few hundreds of lines of code long. But codebases are filled with these things into the 10s and 100s of thousands of lines of code, and all too often that's literally only for positioning elements around. Separate from this, you need event logic in entirely separate files. Yeah, I know it's not really how people do things in React these days, but it's a hard step backwards. I firmly believe this. It's another reason why people are holding on to Vue, which, granted you can put an entire component's code in one file, but eventually you will really, really, not want this. You'll eventually want to think of things in classical styling separate from logic, and logic from layout, which all coincidentally have been in place with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for decades. Apple isn't the target. They're a non-player. WHATWG and W3C are. Anything else is acting like an athlete trying to compete with an old man. [1]: https://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/visuren.html https://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/visuren.html

sebe 8y ago
Interesting thing is Flutter was started as an experiment by guys on the chrome team, Ian Hickson, co-editor of the CSS 2.1 spec, works on Flutter as a TL. An aim of the Flutter team is to improve the developer experience. Google uses a design pattern to helps to separate presentation from business logic, this allows them to share code across flutter and the web. https://pub.dartlang.org/packages/bloc https://pub.dartlang.org/packages/bloc Here is the design bit from Flutter 1.0 live stream. https://youtu.be/NQ5HVyqg1Qc?t=5940 https://youtu.be/NQ5HVyqg1Qc?t=5940

xenihn 8y ago

I'm a native iOS dev, and I've found the following two tools extremely useful in lieu of native hot reload: https://github.com/johnno1962/InjectionIII https://github.com/johnno1962/InjectionIII (does not work with storyboards) https://sherlock.inspiredcode.io https://sherlock.inspiredcode.io

draw_down 8y ago

With UI, the devil is always, always, always in the details. Always.

mttyng 8y ago

I was recently introduced to https://expo.io/ https://expo.io/, which, while seeming more flexible (I don't even need to plug my device in to my machine) for app development, seems to have severe limitations for Native APIs. I couldn't find anything explicit -as far as a quick search went- for Flutter's limitations. Does anyone have experience with it enough to point them out?

therockhead 8y ago
>I don't even need to plug my device in to my machine This is common for most mobile development including Flutter.
- mttyng 8y ago
  Oh, okay. I'm not a mobile developer. I've just started to get my feet wet with it. One of its (expo's) other selling points is "over the air" updates, meaning a user doesn't have to go through the respective app stores. I thought that was a thing with RN too, but I'm not sure.
  - madebysquares 8y ago
    Expo is excellent for developing in RN. The best thing is being able to send the app to other users without needing to install anything outside of the expo app. I just started digging into flutter last week so I don’t have a an opinion yet.

Nelkins 8y ago

Hot reload is such a productive feature for anything related to app/GUI development. Been playing around with a project called Fabulous (F# cross-platform app development)[0] and it's been a ton of fun. Here's a cool example of the hot-reloading in action[1]. [0] https://fsprojects.github.io/Fabulous/ https://fsprojects.github.io/Fabulous/ [1] https://twitter.com/JasonImison/status/1072074268333228032 https://twitter.com/JasonImison/status/1072074268333228032