Today, as part of Mobile World Congress 2018, we are excited to announce the first beta release of Flutter. Flutter is Google’s new mobile UI framework that helps developers craft high-quality native interfaces for both iOS and Android. Get started today at flutter.io to build beautiful native apps in record time.
This looks like it’s an obvious play to get people ready for Fuschia. If it flops, Google’s play to replace Android takes a massive setback.
tidux,
Is it just me?
re: but isn’t this entire article just a big ad?
It’s an “article” on devlopers.googleblog.com introducing a new technology. Of course it reads like an advert, and why shouldn’t it?
It’s not pretending to be from an independent source.
vicdavery,
It’s hard to describe exactly why it bothers me. Thom has posted plenty of technology articles about new products & releases, etc, but the marketing drivel in this one seems way too excessive to ignore. I think I’m just wary of sales-pitches and prefer articles be more informative & descriptive (which they usually are). In my opinion the quality of articles would drop if this were to become a normal thing.
To be fair, Microsoft haven’t exactly tried to lead by example. Office is still win32, so is most of Windows. The UWP stuff on top is nothing but a very thin skin, even the ribbon in Windows Explorer (not even UWP) disappears once you open a system explorer windows like control panel. The rapid and repeat change from Metro to Modern to UWP sure didn’t help things. Microsoft likes to talk, but they do not lead and, if you want to change an industry, you have to lead first.
The part that is really weird to me is that Google makes both Android and Flutter and decided not to use Native UI components anyway (the also make Skia, which is what they do use)
Interesting, I somehow never heard of Skia till now!
The thing about Flutter is that it’s 100 percent Dart. Every widget in Flutter is assembled out of primitives similar to what something like Skia lets you do, but written in pure Dart. It’s “Dart all the way down” so to speak. This makes sense if you think about the future of Fuschia: the idea is that you target Dart primarily; if/when Java or C++ Code is supported, it would likely be considered “legacy” in a similar manner to how Apple treats anything not written in Objective-C or Swift. From the perspective of this future platform, it’s not really odd that they don’t build off of something else.
I also never heard of Skia but I was surprised about its application hear. Flutter isn’t “Dart all the way down”, it is “Dart for application logic but Skia for the UI”.
It is this UI part that, although very nicely explained on the flutter faq, completely takes me by surprise. Basically Google is making the Android UI in 1 team, but another team of Googlers says that you should make your own UI because the Android UI doesn’t develop quickly enough.
Ah ok, I missed that Flutter uses Skia. I just sort of assumed everything was written in Dart since the Dart is compiled to native.
I think Flutter solves two problems, first is cross platform development, second is a future smartphone UI framework. It’s hardly surprising to me that Google wants to leave the Android API behind at some point considering it uses Java, which has contentious licensing, plus has tons of legacy stuff and was never really designed for fluid, smooth animations – as I recall an entire large part of an Android release – “Project Butter” – needed to be dedicated to smoothing over the cracks.
Edited 2018-03-01 17:02 UTC
So, is it something similar to QML?
Wow, that widget tree for the trivial sample app is HORRIFYINGLY huge.