The ONLY Reason I Use Flutter

[@alexpol108]

Sounds like a good trailer of something bigger, when are you going to release the whole story?)

[@FilledStacks]

haha, there's a lot more in the story, maybe I'll share some more stories from my dev career. Is there anything in particular you would find interesting?

[@alexpol108]

@@FilledStacks maybe some interesting use cases, which make clear why it's important to draw pixels directly, and also highlight strong and weak points of the framework. Thanks 🙏

[@FilledStacks]

@@alexpol108 Thank you for the response. I appreciate it.

[@dennisflood9546]

Same journey here with a focus on cross platform and controlling the pixels - but starting with flash - which actually had a similar approach to what flutter is doing now.

[@FilledStacks]

That's awesome to hear! And yes, at the company I worked at there were a lot of flash developers always commenting on how there should be a framework like flash for mobile apps, and then Flutter arrived.

[@erlend1587]

What are your thoughts on having a Flutter app look like a native app? (iOS and Android apps having different styles and widgets)

[@paul_wiggin]

This is useless. When was the last time you`v seen a popular app that uses native UI elements? Every app wants to have personality, so it would be easy to remember and advertise - its the basics of branding.

[@FilledStacks]

I talk to a few Flutter developers that us it in that way. They complain that the fidelity of the graphics is not as good as native iOS rendering, which is true. Even Tim Sneath showed the comparisons of SwiftUI vs Flutter on Twitter. You can do it, but it won't be a perfect match, and also not a perfect feel.

[@FilledStacks]

@@paul_wiggin that's a good point, but there are some devs that love the cupertino look, and also when you target the US market it helps in some cases. I know a dev that's doing that specifically because he likes how iOS native UI looks. But he is having problems making it look EXACTLY the same

[@ZyroZoro]

​@@FilledStacks Why is making it look exactly the same difficult? If you can draw individual pixels, then presumably you should be able to draw them exactly how they're shown in iOS. Is it a library problem? Maybe the Cupertino library isn't perfect?

[@FilledStacks]

@@ZyroZoro Yes, the cupertino library isn't perfect. In addition to that there's a difference between how the font rendering works on iOS vs Flutter. Go to Tim Sneaths page on Twitter, you'll find his swiftUI vs Flutter comparisons and challenges. It'll show you the small differences.

[@Haroun.Benmahdjoub]

Could you elaborate more on "drawing pixels itself" and "drawing its own pixels".

[@hakim_jazuli]

other framework or native language for device ussually use native component to render things... example: web standard render using html element; mobile and dekstop calls their own component to render; while flutter, if I got it correct, don't calls those natives, but render pixels individually... if you are familliar with web dev, then it's like rendering your page solely using canvas tag and draw pixels on it, instead of using standard html tag... the upside of doing this approach is that no mater what platform you bundle it, it will render the same view down to single pixels...

[@Haroun.Benmahdjoub]

@@hakim_jazuli Thank you! I think I grasped the idea, do you have a link to a video that explain the concept with the differences with others?

[@hakim_jazuli]

@@Haroun.Benmahdjoub unfortunately no... I only recalled from what I picked from researching... but say... you can technically build web app... by compiling to webGL from a game engine like godot or the similiar... and theres no way it will compiled to native html tag... they would use canvas/similiar and render each pixels... if I'm not wrong, flutter competitor on mobile platform, react native renders native element by parsing javascript code on each device target... which lead to relatively lower performance score due to shipped javascript runtime environtment... not necesarily a badthing, if you consider dev time, since there are more javascript developer than dart(the language flutter uses) both offers the samething to target multiple device at once, instead of using multiple language to develop...

[@hakim_jazuli]

@@Haroun.Benmahdjoub I cannot see my last replay... but I bassically recalled from memory from the time researching... if I'm not mistaken react native, flutter competitor to target mobiles, used native component, it uses different approach by shipping javascript to run in background to access and render native component... but it seems have relatively lower performance score comapred to flutter... I would say it still have pros, as there are more js' developer in the market than darts(language that flutter uses)... cons is react native only target mobiles, while flutter also can target dekstop and web...

[@FilledStacks]

@@hakim_jazuli great breakdown.

[@consciousmayank]

Funnily i switched to flutter because I wanted to build iOs apps too and dint want to learn any new language 🤪

[@FilledStacks]

haha, Xamarin was already doing that for me with my favorite language so I needed something more than that to switch over. Pixels did it for me 😄

[@RumeshSLT]

What is the tool you used for this presentation?

[@FilledStacks]

Figma for the graphics. I made a large board and scrolled through it. screen.studio to record the screen capture

[@0xFrostbite13x0]

Curious about your opinion on Compose Multiplatform from Jetbrains.

[@lx2222x]

If Kotlin didn't use Gradle or Maven for these project types then I would use it

[@0xFrostbite13x0]

@@lx2222x Then what would they use? Realistically speaking, everything that runs on android will use Gradle, including flutter

[@FilledStacks]

I haven't tried it out yet so I don't have much of an opinion on it. It's something I've been meaning to look at but with the efforts of building my own software and running a business it's not something that I can afford to do now.

[@FilledStacks]

@@lx2222xI really wish there could be a cross platform build system that actually works better than maven/gradle and whatever xcode is doing.

[@andreygritsay762]

As far as I understood basically it's the same as Flutter (uses Skia enginge), but uses Kotlin instead of Dart and at the moment Kotlin seems to be more powerful language than Dart, but with nuances across platforms (for example you cannot use Kotlin's DateTime because it comes from JVM environment). At the end of the day I don't see any reason for Flutter developer switch to it, only for native Android developers

[@okokokokokok5173]

Did you test react native, what do you think about it ???

[@FilledStacks]

Yes, I actually worked with react native when I helped out a company where I knew the lead programmer. It was okay, the biggest issue I had with it was the stability of the environment and it always breaking. The second issue was the state of hot-reload, at the time. I was building a very large app with it (for a bank) and it was a very bad experience for me. It would keep breaking and never really allow me to move fast over days consistently.

[@okokokokokok5173]

And I heard about issue when adding packages ? You need to add the package in three files Gradle + info.plist + React Native file, does it true ?????? @@FilledStacks

[@philosophia5577]

Completely True, now with Impeller, I cant wait to write custom shaders in my apps!

[@FilledStacks]

Yeah, that's gonna be really awesome.

[@meysammahfouzi]

What are custom shaders and what are they used for?

[@FilledStacks]

@@meysammahfouzi a shader is a program that runs, that allows you to change the appearance of individual pixels. Commonly used in games to render things like water, reflections, smoke, particles or create illusions of certain graphical styles even when the underlying assets don't look that way. .i.e Borderlands uses a shader to render everything using something called shell shading, so all assets have an outline and flat colors. That's done with a single shader and you don't have to "build it into the entire game".

[@meysammahfouzi]

Thank you! Then it's mostly used for game development.@@FilledStacks

[@usmanhafeez743]

Hey, Can you please create a video on memory management in flutter? If you don't have much time for creating video can you please create a short even. please.

[@FilledStacks]

Hey, I have never had to do memory management in Flutter because it uses a garbage collector so I have no experience in memory management in Flutter.

[@usmanhafeez743]

@@FilledStacks okay, thank you so much for quick response 🙂

[@TheGamingAlong]

Then the KZbinr Theo gg said using game engine for a mobile app is a bad thing lol

[@FilledStacks]

haha, it makes sense if you're not building cross platform applications. But with cross platform games have proven, without a doubt, that controlling the rendering pipeline is currently the best way we know of to go cross platform.

[@forktrader7870]

whats your plan with stacked? is it abandon now? stacked generate is not updated to latest analysis dependency.😂 got to switch bloc than maintain my code with stacked near unusable.😂

[@FilledStacks]

We use stacked every day 😄 I'm using it to build testsweets.com , my client apps use it, there's a thousands of others using it daily. That dependency update is a warning, not an error, Everything still works fine.

[@forktrader7870]

@@FilledStacks nah. how about collision dependency? it seems that i seems you want to give up other library to cater your outdated library. example library ported/update their analysis to latest 6.13 and so on. but stacked generate still dependent on 6.11 or lower. not maintainable.

[@silientlips]

What do you think about PLATFORM CHANNELS in Flutter? We want to hear your thoughts about it. 😃😃😃

[@FilledStacks]

I think it's awesome! It gives you access to communicate directly to the native code and use whatever you want from the native side. The same goes for PlatformViews where you can use any UI from the native platform directly in Flutter. I think it's a great way to make sure we can interact with what we need on the native platform side.

[@g-luu]

Cool story👌🏾

[@FilledStacks]

Thank you.

[@tonhom260]

i love flutter over other because it s cross platform and use dart which is close to typescript that i get used haha lov it

[@FilledStacks]

haha, that's a good reason to use it! I also love dart because it's similar to C#, which I got use to along my journey.

[@tonhom260]

@@FilledStacks may be both ts and c# are close ??🤣🤣

[@FilledStacks]

@@tonhom260 they are, it's both developed by Microsoft so it's really close to each other.

[@Apenschi]

Absolutely correct!

[@FilledStacks]

I love the pixels!

[@Apenschi]

@@FilledStacks me too!

[@Devorkan]

Bolding

[@FilledStacks]

😁

[@somevideos99999]

💯💯💯

[@FilledStacks]

Given your name I assume you've gone through waaaaaaaay more tech than I have 😄 Any cross platform tech you worked with that you liked before Flutter?

[@ProductionReadyApp]

Flutter is good but react native is far better for developing truly native cross platform android/ios apps.

[@iGhostr]

elaborate

[@FilledStacks]

It hasn't been for me. I built an app for a bank using React native a few years back and the experience was absolutely terrible. Flutter has been the absolute best experience for me as a dev by far. But we all have different styles and backgrounds, so if you're from a web background, which I'm not, react native might feel way better for you.

[@o_glethorpe]

How can it be truly native? What do you use for let's say, make a http request?

[@FilledStacks]

@@o_glethorpe native in this case is because react is translated to the native underlying system instead of using their own rendering pipeline.

[@o_glethorpe]

@@FilledStacks but still uses javascript, yes the button is the native one but every thing you do you go back and forth between javascript and native, calling true native just because it shows the device button is a lie.