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This is the example flutter app for the web -https://www.nytimes.com/games/prototype/kenken#/ https://www.nytimes.com/games/prototype/kenken#/ This is flash. Y

This is the example flutter app for the web -https://www.nytimes.com/games/prototype/kenken#/ https://www.nytimes.com/games/prototype/kenken#/ This is flash. You can't do anything in it that fills like the web - no copy paste, right clicking causes things to happen. I don't expect games like this to have links and proper bookmarkable urls, but I doubt it'll work as expected if it did. This is the epitome of the problem with flutter - it re-implements the UI, creating an experience that is just close enough but not good enough. And no matter how many smart people and an insane amount of resources they put into it, it'll never be good enough. There's a reason why flash died out, and it's not only apple. It was dropped for making interactive website long before apple killed it - it doesn't work well with the web.

akadeb 7y ago
Thanks for sharing this link. I have been an avid Sudoku fan and am really glad I found Ken-Ken
Apocryphon 7y ago
I’m not convinced that Flutter needs to beat native to survive- it just needs to be better than React Native, Xamarin, and PWAs.
- 076ae80a-3c97-4 7y ago
  Which is going to be hard. Xamarin these days is really nice to work with.
  - Apocryphon 7y ago
    Perhaps, but for whatever reason React Native seems to still dwarf it. Maybe the companies that tend to churn out popular mobile apps just don’t invest in .NET?
    - k__ 7y ago
      React-Native has two significant pros that Flutter doesn't have. Native UI. I heard multiple times now that Flutter drains the battery rather quickly because it doesn't use the highly optimized native UI elements. JavaScript. There are more JavaScript developers out there than .NET ones. Also, the JS devs are much cheaper. Another interesting pro is, you can use RN to develop basically everywhere. Expo (a RN framework) announced Web support, so you get Android, iOS, and Web out of the box. Microsoft announced UWP support and rewrote react-native-windows.
    - MrGilbert 7y ago
      Well, it might be burned soil. Even in tech companies it's hard to convince the "decision-makers" to have another look at a technology that failed some years ago. Also, you need some experienced people to look at new technology.
- ricardobeat 7y ago
  Beating RNW and PWAs will be hard. It’s a bit worrying to have Google pushing both PWAs and Flutter, there is always the chance of collateral damage from infighting.
  - fauigerzigerk 7y ago
    It seems like hedging your bets by supporting a large number of competing SDKs is the new normal. Microsoft does exactly the same thing. Apple appears to be alone in committing to something specific. The problem with this sort of hedging is that it only works for platform providers but not for developers.
- ajconway 7y ago
  The biggest advantage of React Native is that it makes use of native UI. You won’t be able to embed a browser, or a performant video player into a Flutter app (on iOS, at least).
  - the_duke 7y ago
    Sure you will: https://pub.dev/packages/webview_flutter https://pub.dev/packages/webview_flutter
    - ajconway 7y ago
      Great news! But, looking at the iOS implementation, it seems that it severely affects performance. Might work for simple apps (but then again, so does React Native).
      - rounce 7y ago
        > But, looking at the iOS implementation, it seems that it severely affects performance. How did you come to that conclusion? They use the same Webview classes that RN wraps.
Jare 7y ago
> You can't do anything in it that fills like the web Why "can't"? In this example they were making a game not a web, and they wanted it to feel like a game. The texts you see there are ultimately a plain old HTML p tag with selection and mouse interaction overridden, but I'd be surprised if you can't change those behaviours.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
romanovcode 7y ago
Also slow.
- macspoofing 7y ago
  Flash was fast. Much faster than JavaScript+DOM at the time. In fact, it was only within the last few years that browser JavaScript and rendering engines became more performant.
  - the_duke 7y ago
    Not sure why you are downvoted, you are right. The initial loading time was there, but then execution was pretty fast. With the amazingly optimized JS engines we have now, it's easy to forget how slow things were just 10-15 years ago. (I think Chrome really kicked of the competition there)
  - Wintamute 7y ago
    Saying anything remotely positive about Flash is an auto-downvote on HN, even if factually accurate.
  - willtim 7y ago
    Which bit was fast? My wife's MacBook sounded like a jet engine whenever she would play the Facebook flash-based Scrabble. Eventually the machine died of fan failure and I had to spend an entire afternoon doing brain surgery on it. I wasn't surprised when Jobs subsequently banned it from the iPhone!
    - Crinus 7y ago
      > Which bit was fast? The performance. The comparison macspoofing made was with JavaScript+DOM, not with native applications. I wrote games in Flash and played around with JavaScript+Canvas back when HTML5 was still fresh and Flash was still king. The difference in performance was huge and Flash was faster for years. You'd hear people saying that JavaScript+Canvas was a valid replacement, sure, but those people had absolutely zero idea what they were talking about (especially when they said such stuff when there wasn't even a cross platform working sound API). Things changed over the last years, sure. But do not rewrite history, JavaScript+Canvas sucked for a long time compared to Flash (and in some areas, like distribution, still sucks - a single compressed SWF file with all your resources is still nicer for distributing games than a bunch of HTML and whatever else files). FWIW i always maintained that Java was miles ahead any of the above when it came to games (especially about performance), but Sun killed applets brutally with its awful startup times and bloated VMs. Then Oracle came along and just abandoned the whole thing.
coldtea 7y ago
>This is flash. You can't do anything in it that fills like the web - no copy paste Whereas you would have that in a Canvas or OpenGL equivalent web game? >right clicking causes things to happen. That's already the case for tons of websites, there's support for that in web standards. >There's a reason why flash died out, and it's not only apple. Yes. It was controlled by a single company, IDEs were paid for, it was more marketed to designer types, and it was frequently slow and used for apps and annoying stuff.
- stonogo 7y ago
  > It was controlled by a single company, IDEs were paid for, it was more marketed to designer types, and it was frequently slow and used for apps and annoying stuff. So aside from the IDE cost and marketing, there's no difference.
  - ppseafield 7y ago
    It was also a massive vector for security vulnerabilities.
  - coldtea 7y ago
    Perhaps you've missed the "controlled by a single company", made for designer types (by marketing to I don't just mean how it was promoted), slow, and used for ads and annoying stuff like flash screens and such.
    - stonogo 7y ago
      Are you saying that web standards are not controlled by a single company? That is not how I interpret the behavior of the relevant standards bodies of the past decade.
  - lone_haxx0r 7y ago
    More importantly: Flash was closed source.
  - irascible 7y ago
arno_app 7y ago
> This is flash This was exactly what I thought when reading about this. I'm pretty sure the one codebase for multiple plattforms just won't work. An app has it advantages so has a website. Mixing those up leads to something that just combines the disadvantages of both. And this my main critic on Flutter: It just doesn't feel good. Maybe it does on Android but it surely doesn't on iOS or on the Web. I would rather prefer something where I can share a core codebase between platforms and then implement a user facing layer with all the plattform specific features
- cptskippy 7y ago
  > It just doesn't feel good. This was my thought exactly. It's not that it feels different, but that it's not an improvement.
macspoofing 7y ago
You're bemoaning that the lack of use of DOM to render the UI???? Seriously? That ship has sailed when Canvas was introduced in the mid-2000s and it was introduced for the EXACT reason to provide the same kind of capabilities that people had with Flash. People wanted and want to build rich web-based APPLICATIONS - not just websites with columns of text. That's why Flash became huge, and that's why HTML now has Canvas, Video, WebGL, WebAssembly, WebRTC (all of which were available in Flash - sometimes years before they were available in HTML). The specific example you showed, nyTimes puzzle game, you'd never build that on-top of DOM (you could, but why would you?). You'd use JS to draw your UI with the Canvas 2D APIs. So I don't know what you're talking about. >There's a reason why flash died out, and it's not only apple. It was dropped for making interactive website long before apple killed it - it doesn't work well with the web NO!!! That's not why Flash died out. Flash died out because you had a standards-based alternative. Steve Jobs probably accelerated the transition a little bit, but it was inevitable.
- Illniyar 7y ago
  Flashed died out way before canvas. No one but design shops made their websites with it. It remained strong in games and ads and disappeared everywhere else. That is why apple could even survive not supporting it.
  - macspoofing 7y ago
    >Flashed died out way before canvas. No. Canvas was introduced in 2004 but not really mainstreamed until a few years later. I would put the golden age of Flash as 2000-2008, with a slow decline after. >It remained strong in games and ads and disappeared everywhere else. You're just saying things, but you inadvertently hit on the point that I'm making, that is the decline of Flash coincided with HTML/JS being given capabilities to actually replace Flash. Had that never happened, you'd still have Flash because there would be things that people would want to do over the web, and no other way to do it.
andrewdubinsky 7y ago
This is plain javascript. <link rel="preload" href="/games/prototype/kenken/main.dart.js" as="script">
- zemo 7y ago
  dart transpiles to js. that's how it's delivered on the web. Nothing surprising there.
Eric_WVGG 7y ago
Wow. I figured you were exaggerating, but this is dead on. Safari has a native two-fingered-swipe for going back a page, even that's broken here. I can't believe we gotta do this Flash and Silverlight fight all over again. Google should know better.
camgunz 7y ago
There's almost certainly no middle ground between "use the DOM for everything" and "deploy any possible app on the web". As soon as we decided the web was more than just documents, this was inevitable. Smearing tech that's advancing this pretty obvious idea as "Flash" isn't super useful, and rings hollow when applied to Google tech but not Emscripten, WebAssembly, Canvas/WebGL, or other tech that is just transpiled to JavaScript and can only possibly use web APIs. If this bothers you, your argument is with Web 2.0, not Google.
munificent 7y ago
> There's a reason why flash died out A never-ending parade of actively-exploited security bugs?
neop1x 7y ago
yes. And additionally it uses a new Dart language, requiring re-training JS programmers, unusual and less readable noodle-like code, slow single-core compilation and not as much 3rd-party libs and plugins as they are for JS and Cordova, React Native and NativeScript. I liked it at first, but I have doubts it will ever be wide-spread and highly-adopted. At first I hoped it could make Android app development better, getting rid of Java tooling nightmares but it is also bad in its own ways. So many years passed and Android dev experience haven't improved much. And Flutter is considered main Fuchsia UI language. :( I miss xcode and Cocoa...
_bxg1 7y ago
One of the major factors that finally killed flash was the security liability. Presumably Flutter won't have that problem. I'm actually scared of this fact. Flutter could very well be how Google finally kills the open web, if it succeeds.

akadeb 7y ago

Thanks for sharing this link. I have been an avid Sudoku fan and am really glad I found Ken-Ken

Apocryphon 7y ago

I’m not convinced that Flutter needs to beat native to survive- it just needs to be better than React Native, Xamarin, and PWAs.

076ae80a-3c97-4 7y ago
Which is going to be hard. Xamarin these days is really nice to work with.
- Apocryphon 7y ago
  Perhaps, but for whatever reason React Native seems to still dwarf it. Maybe the companies that tend to churn out popular mobile apps just don’t invest in .NET?
  - k__ 7y ago
    React-Native has two significant pros that Flutter doesn't have. Native UI. I heard multiple times now that Flutter drains the battery rather quickly because it doesn't use the highly optimized native UI elements. JavaScript. There are more JavaScript developers out there than .NET ones. Also, the JS devs are much cheaper. Another interesting pro is, you can use RN to develop basically everywhere. Expo (a RN framework) announced Web support, so you get Android, iOS, and Web out of the box. Microsoft announced UWP support and rewrote react-native-windows.
  - MrGilbert 7y ago
    Well, it might be burned soil. Even in tech companies it's hard to convince the "decision-makers" to have another look at a technology that failed some years ago. Also, you need some experienced people to look at new technology.
ricardobeat 7y ago
Beating RNW and PWAs will be hard. It’s a bit worrying to have Google pushing both PWAs and Flutter, there is always the chance of collateral damage from infighting.
- fauigerzigerk 7y ago
  It seems like hedging your bets by supporting a large number of competing SDKs is the new normal. Microsoft does exactly the same thing. Apple appears to be alone in committing to something specific. The problem with this sort of hedging is that it only works for platform providers but not for developers.
ajconway 7y ago
The biggest advantage of React Native is that it makes use of native UI. You won’t be able to embed a browser, or a performant video player into a Flutter app (on iOS, at least).
- the_duke 7y ago
  Sure you will: https://pub.dev/packages/webview_flutter https://pub.dev/packages/webview_flutter
  - ajconway 7y ago
    Great news! But, looking at the iOS implementation, it seems that it severely affects performance. Might work for simple apps (but then again, so does React Native).
    - rounce 7y ago
      > But, looking at the iOS implementation, it seems that it severely affects performance. How did you come to that conclusion? They use the same Webview classes that RN wraps.

Jare 7y ago

> You can't do anything in it that fills like the web Why "can't"? In this example they were making a game not a web, and they wanted it to feel like a game. The texts you see there are ultimately a plain old HTML p tag with selection and mouse interaction overridden, but I'd be surprised if you can't change those behaviours.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

romanovcode 7y ago

Also slow.

macspoofing 7y ago
Flash was fast. Much faster than JavaScript+DOM at the time. In fact, it was only within the last few years that browser JavaScript and rendering engines became more performant.
- the_duke 7y ago
  Not sure why you are downvoted, you are right. The initial loading time was there, but then execution was pretty fast. With the amazingly optimized JS engines we have now, it's easy to forget how slow things were just 10-15 years ago. (I think Chrome really kicked of the competition there)
- Wintamute 7y ago
  Saying anything remotely positive about Flash is an auto-downvote on HN, even if factually accurate.
- willtim 7y ago
  Which bit was fast? My wife's MacBook sounded like a jet engine whenever she would play the Facebook flash-based Scrabble. Eventually the machine died of fan failure and I had to spend an entire afternoon doing brain surgery on it. I wasn't surprised when Jobs subsequently banned it from the iPhone!
  - Crinus 7y ago
    > Which bit was fast? The performance. The comparison macspoofing made was with JavaScript+DOM, not with native applications. I wrote games in Flash and played around with JavaScript+Canvas back when HTML5 was still fresh and Flash was still king. The difference in performance was huge and Flash was faster for years. You'd hear people saying that JavaScript+Canvas was a valid replacement, sure, but those people had absolutely zero idea what they were talking about (especially when they said such stuff when there wasn't even a cross platform working sound API). Things changed over the last years, sure. But do not rewrite history, JavaScript+Canvas sucked for a long time compared to Flash (and in some areas, like distribution, still sucks - a single compressed SWF file with all your resources is still nicer for distributing games than a bunch of HTML and whatever else files). FWIW i always maintained that Java was miles ahead any of the above when it came to games (especially about performance), but Sun killed applets brutally with its awful startup times and bloated VMs. Then Oracle came along and just abandoned the whole thing.

coldtea 7y ago

>This is flash. You can't do anything in it that fills like the web - no copy paste Whereas you would have that in a Canvas or OpenGL equivalent web game? >right clicking causes things to happen. That's already the case for tons of websites, there's support for that in web standards. >There's a reason why flash died out, and it's not only apple. Yes. It was controlled by a single company, IDEs were paid for, it was more marketed to designer types, and it was frequently slow and used for apps and annoying stuff.

stonogo 7y ago
> It was controlled by a single company, IDEs were paid for, it was more marketed to designer types, and it was frequently slow and used for apps and annoying stuff. So aside from the IDE cost and marketing, there's no difference.
- ppseafield 7y ago
  It was also a massive vector for security vulnerabilities.
- coldtea 7y ago
  Perhaps you've missed the "controlled by a single company", made for designer types (by marketing to I don't just mean how it was promoted), slow, and used for ads and annoying stuff like flash screens and such.
  - stonogo 7y ago
    Are you saying that web standards are not controlled by a single company? That is not how I interpret the behavior of the relevant standards bodies of the past decade.
- lone_haxx0r 7y ago
  More importantly: Flash was closed source.
- irascible 7y ago

arno_app 7y ago

> This is flash This was exactly what I thought when reading about this. I'm pretty sure the one codebase for multiple plattforms just won't work. An app has it advantages so has a website. Mixing those up leads to something that just combines the disadvantages of both. And this my main critic on Flutter: It just doesn't feel good. Maybe it does on Android but it surely doesn't on iOS or on the Web. I would rather prefer something where I can share a core codebase between platforms and then implement a user facing layer with all the plattform specific features

cptskippy 7y ago
> It just doesn't feel good. This was my thought exactly. It's not that it feels different, but that it's not an improvement.

macspoofing 7y ago

You're bemoaning that the lack of use of DOM to render the UI???? Seriously? That ship has sailed when Canvas was introduced in the mid-2000s and it was introduced for the EXACT reason to provide the same kind of capabilities that people had with Flash. People wanted and want to build rich web-based APPLICATIONS - not just websites with columns of text. That's why Flash became huge, and that's why HTML now has Canvas, Video, WebGL, WebAssembly, WebRTC (all of which were available in Flash - sometimes years before they were available in HTML). The specific example you showed, nyTimes puzzle game, you'd never build that on-top of DOM (you could, but why would you?). You'd use JS to draw your UI with the Canvas 2D APIs. So I don't know what you're talking about. >There's a reason why flash died out, and it's not only apple. It was dropped for making interactive website long before apple killed it - it doesn't work well with the web NO!!! That's not why Flash died out. Flash died out because you had a standards-based alternative. Steve Jobs probably accelerated the transition a little bit, but it was inevitable.

Illniyar 7y ago
Flashed died out way before canvas. No one but design shops made their websites with it. It remained strong in games and ads and disappeared everywhere else. That is why apple could even survive not supporting it.
- macspoofing 7y ago
  >Flashed died out way before canvas. No. Canvas was introduced in 2004 but not really mainstreamed until a few years later. I would put the golden age of Flash as 2000-2008, with a slow decline after. >It remained strong in games and ads and disappeared everywhere else. You're just saying things, but you inadvertently hit on the point that I'm making, that is the decline of Flash coincided with HTML/JS being given capabilities to actually replace Flash. Had that never happened, you'd still have Flash because there would be things that people would want to do over the web, and no other way to do it.

andrewdubinsky 7y ago

This is plain javascript. <link rel="preload" href="/games/prototype/kenken/main.dart.js" as="script">

zemo 7y ago
dart transpiles to js. that's how it's delivered on the web. Nothing surprising there.

Eric_WVGG 7y ago

Wow. I figured you were exaggerating, but this is dead on. Safari has a native two-fingered-swipe for going back a page, even that's broken here. I can't believe we gotta do this Flash and Silverlight fight all over again. Google should know better.

camgunz 7y ago

There's almost certainly no middle ground between "use the DOM for everything" and "deploy any possible app on the web". As soon as we decided the web was more than just documents, this was inevitable. Smearing tech that's advancing this pretty obvious idea as "Flash" isn't super useful, and rings hollow when applied to Google tech but not Emscripten, WebAssembly, Canvas/WebGL, or other tech that is just transpiled to JavaScript and can only possibly use web APIs. If this bothers you, your argument is with Web 2.0, not Google.

munificent 7y ago

> There's a reason why flash died out A never-ending parade of actively-exploited security bugs?

neop1x 7y ago

yes. And additionally it uses a new Dart language, requiring re-training JS programmers, unusual and less readable noodle-like code, slow single-core compilation and not as much 3rd-party libs and plugins as they are for JS and Cordova, React Native and NativeScript. I liked it at first, but I have doubts it will ever be wide-spread and highly-adopted. At first I hoped it could make Android app development better, getting rid of Java tooling nightmares but it is also bad in its own ways. So many years passed and Android dev experience haven't improved much. And Flutter is considered main Fuchsia UI language. :( I miss xcode and Cocoa...

_bxg1 7y ago

One of the major factors that finally killed flash was the security liability. Presumably Flutter won't have that problem. I'm actually scared of this fact. Flutter could very well be how Google finally kills the open web, if it succeeds.