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>As a result, GTK and GNOME’s design language clashed together. Instead of being as general-purpose as possible, GTK as a cross-platform toolkit contained an en

>As a result, GTK and GNOME’s design language clashed together. Instead of being as general-purpose as possible, GTK as a cross-platform toolkit contained an entire design language intended to be used only by a specific desktop, thus defeating the purpose of a cross-platform toolkit. This is one of the things I like about Flutter. It supports both Material and iOS UI guidelines. There is also an ongoing effort called Blank Canvas[0] to provide easier support for creating arbitrary UI themes (although you can already do this albeit more difficultly). Being that Material looks awful to me (as an Android user, even) I'm glad that they support different UI Designs/guides. [0] design doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rS_RO2DQ_d4_roc3taAB6vXFjv7-9hJP7pyZ9NhPOdA/edit?resourcekey=0-VBzTPoqLwsruo0j9dokuOg#heading=h.34a91yqebirw https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rS_RO2DQ_d4_roc3taAB6vXF...

fl0ki 2y ago
The only thing worse than modern Material is when there was a multi-year (?) period where Google didn't think buttons needed any affordance indicating they were buttons, not in shape, contrast, color, etc. and with touch UIs you don't even get hover feedback like you would on the web. Reading between the lines, I can see that Google was inspired by the post-skeumorphic minimalism of iOS, but took the wrong lessons away from it. Some of that has been walked back, but far from enough.
- fngjdflmdflg 2y ago
  To me Material looks like Google looked at iOS and compared it to their then rectangle-box based UI and said "Our UI is too bland compared to Apple. We must need tons of border radius and padding. And big splash animations when you touch a button!" Some people used to look down on Apple's UI as "fisher price" but Google has long taken that crown in my book. When I make flutter apps for side projects I just use the Apple based widgets (called Cupertino [0]). [0] https://docs.flutter.dev/ui/widgets/cupertino https://docs.flutter.dev/ui/widgets/cupertino
- pentagrama 2y ago
  I remember being annoyed by those text buttons, looking at the latest iteration of Material, it looks like they keep the "text" button style but as a secondary option https://m3.material.io/components/all-buttons https://m3.material.io/components/all-buttons Looking at the examples I think that it works in some contexts, but is a personal feel that I have.
infotainment 2y ago
Ehh… “supports” is a strong word when talking about Flutter’s iOS theme. The last time I tried it, it fell into some kind of UI uncanny valley — it looked mostly like iOS, but there were enough little things off that it just felt wrong.
arghwhat 2y ago
Well, there are caveats to flutter. One, the packages are clearly Material first, with Cupertino not having the same coverage and integration. There's a lot of common iOS UI constructs that are missing or incomplete, and Material is the base-type: There's Scaffold, which is material, and CupertinoPageScaffold, which is the iOS version. Widgets also don't necessarily mix - in cupertino land you need to use cupertino scaffold and page with their transitions, as they have hardcodes dependencies on each other. Second, cupertino is glitchy and just... wrong in so many aspects. Sizes, placement/paddings, animations... Placing an icon-only button in the trailer of an app bar doesn't align it with anything, and something as simple as a page animation is completely wrong: Click on a note in the Notes app, and the title and content of the new page follows each other - in a flutter app, they're on completely independent trajectories. Not to mention that mimicking a photo gallery with pinch zoom, dismiss and swipe to navigate is borderline impossible with flutters gesture stack, and existing packages and built-in Widgets don't get close[0]. Its handling of the screen rotation animation is also horrendous as it just stretches whatever widgets were present with no control. In my opinion, cupertino is just a weak lookalike used to lure developers in, but isn't really good enough to convince users in a "real" app. The real utility of cupertino and its packages are in adding necessary iOS widgets to material or custom UI apps, like share panes. [0]: Apple gets that one a bit wrong too though. Try to zoom in in the right edge of a picture in the Photos app, and start a swipe left from the middle of the screen. When the next image starts to show on the right side of the screen, change direction to swiping right. The previous image will come in from the left, but with a completely glitched out transition. Flutter is way worse though.
- fngjdflmdflg 2y ago
  I appreciate you writing this. These are all valid criticisms of Flutter. Especially the bit about pinch-zoom. Proper zooming is a long missing feature from flutter. There is InteractiveViewer[0] but it does not actually cause a re layout of it's children and it also doesn't respect the ScrollBehavior of the platform. There is also Two Dimensional Scrollables[1] which is a new official Flutter package which could theoretically be used to create a better zoom widget, although this hasn't been done AFAIK. There are some packages that can do this though. As for Cupertino being a bad reproduction of the real iOS behavior, is it really that noticeable to non-developers? If so, that is very sad to here. I actually found out about Flutter via an open source app that was using Cupertino. I really liked the feel of the UI so I looked at the source and found out it was using Flutter. I feel like most Android users do not care about apps feeling "native" as the definition of a native UI feel has changed so drastically over the past decade or so on Android, with major apps like WhatsApp, Youtube, Gmail and stock Samsung apps each having almost completely different UI designs. If there are behaviors in Flutter Cupertino that would confuse iOS users (not just look slightly different) that does in fact sound really bad. >Its handling of the screen rotation animation is also horrendous as it just stretches whatever widgets were present with no control. FWIW I can't reproduce this in my own Cupertino app. For example a 3 column grid becomes a 6 column grid when rotated. [0] https://api.flutter.dev/flutter/widgets/InteractiveViewer-class.html https://api.flutter.dev/flutter/widgets/InteractiveViewer-cl... [1] https://pub.dev/packages/two_dimensional_scrollables https://pub.dev/packages/two_dimensional_scrollables

fl0ki 2y ago

The only thing worse than modern Material is when there was a multi-year (?) period where Google didn't think buttons needed any affordance indicating they were buttons, not in shape, contrast, color, etc. and with touch UIs you don't even get hover feedback like you would on the web. Reading between the lines, I can see that Google was inspired by the post-skeumorphic minimalism of iOS, but took the wrong lessons away from it. Some of that has been walked back, but far from enough.

fngjdflmdflg 2y ago
To me Material looks like Google looked at iOS and compared it to their then rectangle-box based UI and said "Our UI is too bland compared to Apple. We must need tons of border radius and padding. And big splash animations when you touch a button!" Some people used to look down on Apple's UI as "fisher price" but Google has long taken that crown in my book. When I make flutter apps for side projects I just use the Apple based widgets (called Cupertino [0]). [0] https://docs.flutter.dev/ui/widgets/cupertino https://docs.flutter.dev/ui/widgets/cupertino
pentagrama 2y ago
I remember being annoyed by those text buttons, looking at the latest iteration of Material, it looks like they keep the "text" button style but as a secondary option https://m3.material.io/components/all-buttons https://m3.material.io/components/all-buttons Looking at the examples I think that it works in some contexts, but is a personal feel that I have.

infotainment 2y ago

Ehh… “supports” is a strong word when talking about Flutter’s iOS theme. The last time I tried it, it fell into some kind of UI uncanny valley — it looked mostly like iOS, but there were enough little things off that it just felt wrong.

arghwhat 2y ago

Well, there are caveats to flutter. One, the packages are clearly Material first, with Cupertino not having the same coverage and integration. There's a lot of common iOS UI constructs that are missing or incomplete, and Material is the base-type: There's Scaffold, which is material, and CupertinoPageScaffold, which is the iOS version. Widgets also don't necessarily mix - in cupertino land you need to use cupertino scaffold and page with their transitions, as they have hardcodes dependencies on each other. Second, cupertino is glitchy and just... wrong in so many aspects. Sizes, placement/paddings, animations... Placing an icon-only button in the trailer of an app bar doesn't align it with anything, and something as simple as a page animation is completely wrong: Click on a note in the Notes app, and the title and content of the new page follows each other - in a flutter app, they're on completely independent trajectories. Not to mention that mimicking a photo gallery with pinch zoom, dismiss and swipe to navigate is borderline impossible with flutters gesture stack, and existing packages and built-in Widgets don't get close[0]. Its handling of the screen rotation animation is also horrendous as it just stretches whatever widgets were present with no control. In my opinion, cupertino is just a weak lookalike used to lure developers in, but isn't really good enough to convince users in a "real" app. The real utility of cupertino and its packages are in adding necessary iOS widgets to material or custom UI apps, like share panes. [0]: Apple gets that one a bit wrong too though. Try to zoom in in the right edge of a picture in the Photos app, and start a swipe left from the middle of the screen. When the next image starts to show on the right side of the screen, change direction to swiping right. The previous image will come in from the left, but with a completely glitched out transition. Flutter is way worse though.

fngjdflmdflg 2y ago
I appreciate you writing this. These are all valid criticisms of Flutter. Especially the bit about pinch-zoom. Proper zooming is a long missing feature from flutter. There is InteractiveViewer[0] but it does not actually cause a re layout of it's children and it also doesn't respect the ScrollBehavior of the platform. There is also Two Dimensional Scrollables[1] which is a new official Flutter package which could theoretically be used to create a better zoom widget, although this hasn't been done AFAIK. There are some packages that can do this though. As for Cupertino being a bad reproduction of the real iOS behavior, is it really that noticeable to non-developers? If so, that is very sad to here. I actually found out about Flutter via an open source app that was using Cupertino. I really liked the feel of the UI so I looked at the source and found out it was using Flutter. I feel like most Android users do not care about apps feeling "native" as the definition of a native UI feel has changed so drastically over the past decade or so on Android, with major apps like WhatsApp, Youtube, Gmail and stock Samsung apps each having almost completely different UI designs. If there are behaviors in Flutter Cupertino that would confuse iOS users (not just look slightly different) that does in fact sound really bad. >Its handling of the screen rotation animation is also horrendous as it just stretches whatever widgets were present with no control. FWIW I can't reproduce this in my own Cupertino app. For example a 3 column grid becomes a 6 column grid when rotated. [0] https://api.flutter.dev/flutter/widgets/InteractiveViewer-class.html https://api.flutter.dev/flutter/widgets/InteractiveViewer-cl... [1] https://pub.dev/packages/two_dimensional_scrollables https://pub.dev/packages/two_dimensional_scrollables