Google Releases Flutter 3.7, Teases Future of App Development Framework (9to5google.com) 24
An anonymous reader quotes a report from 9to5Google: At the Flutter Forward event, Google released Flutter 3.7 with more Material You widgets and menus support, while also teasing the future of the app development framework. Having grown from humble beginnings on Android and iOS, Google's Flutter SDK can now help you create apps for mobile, desktop, web, and more, all from a single Dart codebase. Since launch, over 700,000 Flutter apps have been published across various platforms.
Today in Nairobi, Kenya, the Flutter team hosted Flutter Forward, an event to connect with the growing global community of developers and showcase the future of app development. For starters, Flutter version 3.7 has now been released, bringing with it a whole host of Material 3 (Material You) widgets. To get a feel for what all is possible with the new generation of Material Design in Flutter, Google has prepared a fun web showcase that even allows you to toggle between Material Theming and Material You. You'll also find that Flutter 3.7 includes new support for creating menus for your app -- including native support for macOS menus, new cascading menu widgets, and the ability to add items to right-click/long-press context menus. The built-in text magnifier on Android and iOS also now works as expected with Flutter's text fields. You can learn more about the improvements of Flutter 3.7 in the full release blog.
Looking ahead, the Flutter team has been working for quite some time on replacing the Skia renderer with a more robust solution of its own. Currently dubbed "Impeller," Flutter's new rendering engine has made significant enough progress to now be ready for developers to test it with their iOS apps. [...] Google is also working on new ways to help Flutter apps integrate with the underlying OS or platform. [...] Meanwhile, for Flutter web apps, a new "js" library makes it easy to call your app's Dart code from the outer page's JavaScript code. Relatedly, you can now embed a Flutter view onto a page through a standard HTML div. Both of these can be seen in a fun demonstration page.
Elsewhere in Flutter web news, Google has made strides toward compiling Dart apps using WebAssembly. [...] In time, this should result in significant performance improvements for Flutter on the web. In addition to compiling to WebAssembly, the Dart team has also begun offering full support for the RISC-V architecture, with the ultimate goal of Flutter apps running on RISC-V. Another major announcement today is that Google is moving forward with its plans to release version 3.0 of the Dart programming language upon which Flutter apps are built. Dart 3.0 is available today for early alpha testing with a focus on requiring sound null safety.
Today in Nairobi, Kenya, the Flutter team hosted Flutter Forward, an event to connect with the growing global community of developers and showcase the future of app development. For starters, Flutter version 3.7 has now been released, bringing with it a whole host of Material 3 (Material You) widgets. To get a feel for what all is possible with the new generation of Material Design in Flutter, Google has prepared a fun web showcase that even allows you to toggle between Material Theming and Material You. You'll also find that Flutter 3.7 includes new support for creating menus for your app -- including native support for macOS menus, new cascading menu widgets, and the ability to add items to right-click/long-press context menus. The built-in text magnifier on Android and iOS also now works as expected with Flutter's text fields. You can learn more about the improvements of Flutter 3.7 in the full release blog.
Looking ahead, the Flutter team has been working for quite some time on replacing the Skia renderer with a more robust solution of its own. Currently dubbed "Impeller," Flutter's new rendering engine has made significant enough progress to now be ready for developers to test it with their iOS apps. [...] Google is also working on new ways to help Flutter apps integrate with the underlying OS or platform. [...] Meanwhile, for Flutter web apps, a new "js" library makes it easy to call your app's Dart code from the outer page's JavaScript code. Relatedly, you can now embed a Flutter view onto a page through a standard HTML div. Both of these can be seen in a fun demonstration page.
Elsewhere in Flutter web news, Google has made strides toward compiling Dart apps using WebAssembly. [...] In time, this should result in significant performance improvements for Flutter on the web. In addition to compiling to WebAssembly, the Dart team has also begun offering full support for the RISC-V architecture, with the ultimate goal of Flutter apps running on RISC-V. Another major announcement today is that Google is moving forward with its plans to release version 3.0 of the Dart programming language upon which Flutter apps are built. Dart 3.0 is available today for early alpha testing with a focus on requiring sound null safety.
genuine question (Score:3)
is it any good as a framework? Not used it myself, but looks interesting
Re: (Score:2)
I can't even tell what they're talking about in the summary. Some sort of butterfly catching event?
Mod parent informative (Score:1)
Re:genuine question (Score:4, Interesting)
I've just finished implementing a simple app using Flutter and no, it's not great. The component library is weird and hard to work with (you have to put widgets inside of widgets inside of widgets to do even the simplest alignment). Rendering engine has many quirks, is hard to work and makes writing tests very difficult. It all just feels like a one big hack, no signs of a proper design in any of it. Writing similar app in react.js would be pretty straightforward task so next time I will try react native. Also, it still has bugs and the devs are very quick to demand example code to reproduce them but once you do your work and provide it they just stop replying. So yeah, not great overall.
Re: (Score:1)
Dart is pretty cool yeah.
Re: (Score:2)
It was fairly easy to get started with, and I now have a single codebase for an extensive internal business app used on for both Android and web.
If you are already familiar with a different framework, you might have to get used to using code for layout. Once you do get the hang of it, the layout is simple and very predictable, and "predictable" was never a state I attributed to css.
YMMV
Re: (Score:3)
Maintenance of frameworks isn't a big deal, nothing lasts more than a few years at Google before being dropped. Even outside of Google there's always a new framework that everyone is compelled to migrate too. It's just built in obsolescence.
Re:Flutter architecture (Score:4, Insightful)
The worst part is that making your own components you may have something that looks like a native one, but it will often not work the same way as the native one, especially when OS updates bring new features or change how things work.
Just like stupid web frameworks keep breaking basic functionality like "Command+click" to open a link in a new browser tab, for example. Or even right-clicking to get options for a link.
I agree, approach is odd (Score:4, Insightful)
I've also done a (very) little but of Flutter work, it seems like they are putting a lot of effort into it.
However like you, I'm not sure I like the fundamental model of not using native widgets, even though if you are building a cross-platform GUI system the Flutter way is probably best.
One notable issue I think I read about a few months ago, was that a Flutter textfield with a blinking cursor in it used something like 50% CPU just sitting there... also I think there may have been copy/paste support issues in the past (surely resolved by now).
To me for cross platform I think the best approach at the moment would be to use straight SQLLite database (so you could use the same schema on Android and iOS), and then Jetpack Compose on Android, and SwiftUI on iOS for the UI.
Have they optimized it yet for... (Score:2)
Have they optimized it yet for maximum damage when the whole thing is abandoned?
Another Dead Man Walking (Score:1)
Another "thing" from Google that they'll plow all sorts of time and energy into, and then abandon.
See "Google Graveyard".
Flutter Web (Score:2)
Wait for them to get webassembly working... (Score:5, Interesting)
Or just use Blazor now with all the good wonderfulness of the .NET Core environment. Sounds like a better deal to use Blazor.
It's so comfortable coding in it, rather than all these other frameworks with their ridiculous build chains and annoyances.
Google has a problem (Score:3)
My biggest problem with it (Score:2)
I really don't want to use Dart. I'd love to be able to use Nim, but I don't see that happening soon, if ever. Maybe a competing project will come to fruition.
Re: (Score:1)
What's your issue with Dart ? I really like what they did with the language, except the transition to null-safe, which felt like a tacked-on mess.
Today in Nairobi, Kenya, the Flutter team hosted (Score:2)
Teases entry into Google Graveyard (Score:2)