Suddenly, Flutter

I had no plans to learn Flutter in 2019

When I first heard of Flutter last year, I couldn’t help but draw parallels to Java Swing, the UI technology I started with in grad school (and thankfully dropped a year or so later). If you don’t know much about Java’s UI technologies, suffice to say that for all of Java’s strengths, no version of their UI framework was ever one of them.

It started okay-ish enough with Java’s AWT toolkit that let Java call native code to create system windows, buttons etc, but devs soon realized that building cross-platform applications (which was always Java’s pitch) was really hard when you could only target the least common denominator widgets that were available across all platforms. “No more” said the Java community, and proceeded to build Swing, a cross-platform UI framework that emulated the system controls by drawing them itself on a canvas.

Sound familiar? That was what Flutter promises with the core graphics engine that would emulate the native Android and iOS widgets

The problem is that Swing turned out to be crap. The widgets never felt native and performed poorly. You could always tell if you were using a Swing app. And it was always interesting when some app wasn’t coded right and you’d end up with apps emulating the Windows look-and-feel on a Mac (who checked on a Mac back in those days)

So Flutter was on my “no-thanks” list. Besides my lack of faith in faking native system widgets, the language they chose was Dart! Who knew Dart? More importantly, where were the interesting libraries in Dart? Having done a few React Native apps before, I liked my options with JavaScript and the dream of making cross-platform (mobile AND web) apps.

But then a couple of things happened. One: I saw some pretty compelling Flutter based apps. The interesting thing was, the best apps try to create their own design language anyway, so deviating from the system look-and-feel felt okay; and then second: I tried Flutter for a labweek project and was won over by the one click deploy to multiple platforms and the hot reload (it might also have been just fortuitous timing as I was losing my mind with React Native’s minimal support for custom views and animations, something that Flutter promises a lot more control over)

So for the last 4 months or so I have been working with Flutter and I have to say I really enjoy it. Some parts are definitely rough (I still don’t love the indentation hell when describing layouts) but Dart is enjoyable and is very inspired by the best parts of JavaScript and Swift (among others). Recent additions to Dart have been very interesting, because they address issues in real-world UI development. This feels different from the more generic “Lets create a general purpose language and allow it for UI dev” approach of other languages.

But the core reason I am excited about Flutter is the culture. The reason Swing was a dud (IMHO) was that it was built by people who didn’t care to push UI experiences. The native mobile toolkits are better but still make it hard to build complex user interfaces (SwiftUI and Jetpack Compose are trying to change that). Example “Hello World” apps you see using native toolkits are pretty generic form-based apps.

But look at the kinds of apps Flutter shows off:

🤩

While this may not be everyone’s cup of tea, this “think-outside-boxy-layouts” approach has my vote.

4 months in, I am still new-ish to Flutter but I guess I am on board. Stay tuned for more random Flutter stuff on this blog 🙂