I am available for Flutter work

[Guyren Howe]

I’m getting into learning Flutter, and have gone a decent way. It occurs to me that I am ready to write significant apps with it, although I wouldn’t call myself an expert yet.

If you have a need for desktop or mobile apps (or both!), I would be happy to negotiate a fixed, lowish price for the work, payable on completion. The only caveat would be that I would be doing it part-time and still learning a bit, so it would have to be something that wasn’t urgent.

I am an experienced Rails and database developer, so could work very well with your Rails team.

[Jon Tara]

So, Flutter is not just for games any more?

I find the fact that the Dart code is AOT (Ahead of Time) compiled to ARM code on iOS and Android quite interesting. Maybe we will finally see a stake firmly pounded through the chest of Java. We can only hope!

I spoke with a Google VP at the Zebra conference in Las Vegas in 2019, and learned that many/most of Google's own Android apps have not been using Java for some time, but instead use the NDK (Native Development Kit), and are written in or at least making use of C++ or other AOT-compiled language code for performance reasons.

One of the things I've liked about the Rhomobile hybrid mobile platform (besides - of course - it's use of Ruby!) is that it uses NDK on Android, since most of it's internal code is C++ or C, and so since NDK is part of the normal build process, and there is an easy way to call native code, it is simple to slip-in some C/C++ or any other machine code and use on both iOS and Android. The small drawback is that you have to compile for each architecture. (Does Flutter support X86 Android, or just ARM? There are quite a few X86-based tablets...)

Curious, why does Google call Flutter a "UI Toolkit" (right on the home page...). It's a cross-OS app development platform, right? Are they for some reason afraid to call it such? What's missing? Does it have coverage of many/most onboard hardware features? (Like sensors, camera, etc.?)

Have you explored Python desktop/mobile development platforms, like Kivy and Beework?

I've toyed with the idea of taking the (now completely open-source) Rhomobile core functionality which is mostly C/C++ and has very complete coverage of onboard mobile device features and creating a Go-based hybrid platform. Or adding Go as an option for MVC endpoints. (Rhomobile already supports NodeJS as an alternative to their Ruby MVC, and you can mix and match).

I think given the fact that Flutter compiles Dart down to native code, you will find that Flutter finally busts the myth that you need to write iOS and Android apps with the "native" (whatever that actually means) Language-of-the-Month - e.g. Objective-C ... er ...  Swift or Java ... er... Kotlin to gain good mobile performance. This inaccurate assessment has been sticking around ALMOST as long as the one about most software not being able to take good advantage of multiple cores!

I smell an upcoming SDRuby presentation!

[Alan Da Costa]

“So, Flutter is not just for games any more?”

I’m not sure if it was for games to begin but I think the goal has been general cross platform use, however, there are some flutter libraries that don’t run on all platforms and certain code may require conditional platform checks.

IOS made a recent change that is causing shaders to compile at runtime, sometimes resulting in jank. This certainly isn’t what you want for a game and the workaround is to keep graphics simple. I’m sure they’ll fix this but it might take another few minor builds (I’m pro flutter). They’re continuously improving the platform but don’t expect it to always be as good as native lang/framework builds, just quicker to build and maintain, and 98% as good.

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