Of all the web based mobile app development services, FlutterFlow makes more sense as flutter has graduated to be a viable cross-platform development software and dart is well-suited for creating a visual programming tool.
I'm excited to see desktop applications built using FlutterFlow as desktop support for flutter is fast improving.
P.S. I've added FlutterFlow to my curated list of startup tools - https://startuptoolchain.com/ under Visual Programming. I wish you all the best.
Howdy! Are you planning on Desktop support for the UI builder? I was about to hand you all my money but it doesn't like it exists yet... or at least allow me to set custom dimensions on the editor/preview.
Also, does it support rendering/previewing custom widgets?
FWIW-- I've done a fair amount iOS development and loved IB (despite all the crashes and issues) for the easy visual editing; so, I'm primarily looking at this as a way to better visualize and layout my components (I personally don't need incredibly robust desktop support).
would love to see a 5-min version of this video, narrated and/or annotated, with zero formatting, or bootstrap-like default formatting.
one thing that always trips me out with UI builders is seeing how, to produce some 'simple' list, you have to stack a grid, on top of a card, on top of a row, on top of a column, on top of a cell, on top of a row, inside of a column, etc.
just seems like i should be able to drag one simple list-like component into the view, wire up the api/db query, done.
Hey, can I use the UI design of flutterflow for a tool I'm building.
The tool is called ui-editor and it generates code in reactjs. I'm trying to address few problems in web as an experiment here is the link to the tool
https://github.com/imvetri/ui-editor
I wish you success. I really like Dart and the concept of Flutter.
However: I'm still waiting for a 100% Flutter-based iOS app published in the app store that I can try to make sure that it does not have any apparent jank.
Yes, I know that Flutter 2.2 which launched a few days ago included tools designed to fight some of the sources of jank (e.g. bundling precompiled shaders) but after such a long time of promises from the Flutter team I just want to see a 100% flutter app hitting a solid 60 fps on my own phone, for real.
I think google pay[0] is entirely flutter[1] (how much is actually flutter is unknown). It does seem pretty slow, actually - it’s like it only plays every third frame when animating switching between the app’s tabs.
I'm waiting for Flutter to stop draining the battery. On my Mac, a single TextField with a blinking cursor inside uses somewhere between 10% and 20% CPU. This is a complete show stopper for me.
Initially this looks really nice - very much the kind of tooling I’ve thought about for Flutter since I started using it.
This product aside, though, I find it funny how the whole “reactive widget tree that gets rebuilt when data changes” and “everything is just nested objects with properties, no XML needed” trend felt like “backlash” against the UI Builders, Visual Basics, and Glades.
And yet now we’re building visual tools to control all the nested reactive component frameworks very much in that same vein.
I checked it out - but I think most developers would be more comfortable writing Dart code to develop Flutter code. I can see that something like FlutterFlow is useful if you need snippets to e.g. get a stylized layout with little effort.
Kind of like a quick way of getting the look you want, and then pasting it back into Android Studio. Even then I'd change and improve the code - I see that the styles are a bit "hard coded" with a variety of fonts I have never seen the need to use.
I've tried it out, registered for the premium to check out the details.
Biggest problem: querying Firebase is problematic. I can bind a collection to a ListView, but in many cases I'd like to map a field to something. For example I have a list of "purchases" and I'd like to map the "buyerId" to an email address. This can't be done, and the generated code is hard to adapt to this kind of use case.
And therein lies the complexity to be honest.
I think it'd worth $30 just as a designer. But you have to be able to code.
In this scenario, your collection is "purchases" and there's a "buyerId" field in a purchase document? And you want to get the email from buyerId?
If buyerId is a uid, you can do another query to get the user document from uid and get the email address from that. I may be misunderstanding the question.
In theory, I love the idea of web builders such as this. I think creating simple CRUD apps is still surprisingly difficult but this tool seems to strike the right balance between complexity and simplicity. At least from the marketing it appears that way. I look forward to playing around with this and I hope for continued integration with as many tools as possible.
At the risk of being a grump, is this yet another thing that could probably be as good as HyperCard, but won't because monetizing these sort of heavily creative things tends not to work?
FlutterFlow cofounder here. Thanks for your input on our pricing.
It's more than knowing how to code, we've been building with Flutter for a while now, but there's still no way we could have coded FlutterMet in under an hour. It would take us 10 hrs+ to manually do that. But it took <1 hour in FlutterFlow.
I don't think you're the target audience, then. A startup would be happy spending $70 a month (per developer) if it made their developers even 1% more productive:
$100,000 / 12 * 0.01 == $83.33
(This is a low estimate; the value an engineer delivers to an organization is generally much larger than their compensation.)
It's possible that you believe they should introduce a cheaper tier (hobbyist, open source) with a reduced feature set, but IMO $70 is probably undercharging for most tech corporations.
On the contrary, that is way too cheap. Equal to approximately 30 minutes a month of a decent iOS developers time. If the product works it should deliver 10-100 times that value.
$70/month is definitely too cheap if it delivers what it promises. Unity3D is similar in concept but for games and charges $0/yr/seat, $400/yr/seat or $1800/yr/seat depending on how much your company makes.
I'm genuinely curious how easy no-code app development has to become in order to be adopted at scale in the software industry. Right now I'm still getting the sense that most companies prefer to hire a dedicated app development team and have full control over the architecture.
Yes, you generally always run into something that the company building your low code tools will need to cater for or fix for you somehow. It gives you so much grief that you might as well write and own your tools.
I've read about an hospital management system implemented by low-code. So if it can be useful to that complexity levels, maybe the problem isn't technical, but more about marketing, control over the platform, or just general resistance by software developers.
So i wonder, how long do those shifts towards a much higher productivity platform take in the software industry ?
Depends on your use case. I'd say everything that is easily adaptable to a certain amount of common settings, is already there: run of the mill webshops, static websites/blogs/cms-es, forms, "info card" apps. And even with these, run if you want to think outside the box. More complex scenarios require so many knobs and switches that anyone working on them has to become a quasi-developer of a much worse and restrictive "language", akin to SAP or Liferay. So other than that above, put all the "no-code" tech besides "disruptive ai big data blockchain augmented reality platform".
I think the point is more to take a set of common problems out of the software industry. The classic example for me here is the spreadsheet. For many of its uses, it's definitely not as good as bespoke software, but also way better than paying for a dedicated app development team.
I am conflicted about Flutter. Is it worth learning, over, say Angular (for web) or Xamarin (for mobile and cross platform stuff)?
Flutter for web was just released after a long time in beta stage. It looks like a good language and framework, but I don't see many options for customization. And frankly, the UI composition syntax is tasteless, in my view (Compared to React, which is awesome, or Angular, which is verbose and complex but still understandable)
Flutter is much much better than Xamarin imo. And imo, it has been far easier for many folks to pick up Flutter over ReactNative, especially those coming from JS backgrounds.
That being said, the jank issues with Flutter on iOS make it a showstopper. And web and Windows Flutter is like in alpha.
Same here. VB was widely dogged, perhaps rightly so. But I've never been near as fast or productive when making a functional GUI. It's sad that fell out of favor.
Considering one has to hand write an ios approach and a material design one unless they support the Flutter Platform widgets plugins most of your would probably need to avoid this.
My bias, I am not the project lead on flutter Platform widgets but I am one of the lower end contributors.
The low-codeness is certainly impressive. Judging from the sample app though, Flutter still has a long way to go in terms of native look-and-feel (on iOS at least).
asgreaves|4 years ago
We try to generate clean Flutter code that follows best practices – we have a long way to go, but we couldn't be more excited.
Edit: Also, here's the video of us building it (in just under an hour): https://youtu.be/TXsjnd_4SBo
Abishek_Muthian|4 years ago
I'm excited to see desktop applications built using FlutterFlow as desktop support for flutter is fast improving.
P.S. I've added FlutterFlow to my curated list of startup tools - https://startuptoolchain.com/ under Visual Programming. I wish you all the best.
TrispusAttucks|4 years ago
I see the web/index.html references a service worker that doesn't exist in the repo. Is this the case or am I looking in the wrong place?
Do you have a generated service worker file you can share?
rubyn00bie|4 years ago
Also, does it support rendering/previewing custom widgets?
FWIW-- I've done a fair amount iOS development and loved IB (despite all the crashes and issues) for the easy visual editing; so, I'm primarily looking at this as a way to better visualize and layout my components (I personally don't need incredibly robust desktop support).
Thanks for the work on this it looks awesome.
treyhuffine|4 years ago
- Is it possible to set an API request header to include the Firebase ID token?
- Are you able to embed a webview on a page?
- Is there a pattern yet for in-app payments?
salimmadjd|4 years ago
Your backgrounds [1] seem very solid so why not showcase it?
[1] https://www.linkedin.com/in/asgreaves
readonthegoapp|4 years ago
would love to see a 5-min version of this video, narrated and/or annotated, with zero formatting, or bootstrap-like default formatting.
one thing that always trips me out with UI builders is seeing how, to produce some 'simple' list, you have to stack a grid, on top of a card, on top of a row, on top of a column, on top of a cell, on top of a row, inside of a column, etc.
just seems like i should be able to drag one simple list-like component into the view, wire up the api/db query, done.
swyx|4 years ago
am always interested in how companies transition from a deep build phase into a build-and-market-what-you've-already-built phase.
imvetri|4 years ago
The tool is called ui-editor and it generates code in reactjs. I'm trying to address few problems in web as an experiment here is the link to the tool https://github.com/imvetri/ui-editor
zestyping|4 years ago
Artistry121|4 years ago
steveharman|4 years ago
Gys|4 years ago
sterwill|4 years ago
faldore|4 years ago
[deleted]
tpmx|4 years ago
However: I'm still waiting for a 100% Flutter-based iOS app published in the app store that I can try to make sure that it does not have any apparent jank.
Yes, I know that Flutter 2.2 which launched a few days ago included tools designed to fight some of the sources of jank (e.g. bundling precompiled shaders) but after such a long time of promises from the Flutter team I just want to see a 100% flutter app hitting a solid 60 fps on my own phone, for real.
judge2020|4 years ago
0: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/google-pay-save-pay-manage/id1...
1: https://developers.googleblog.com/2020/09/google-pay-picks-f...
novok|4 years ago
Apple SwiftUI for iOS & macOS.
Flutter for Android, Windows, Linux and possibly a web client.
fauigerzigerk|4 years ago
markdog12|4 years ago
https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/32170#issuecomment...
Comment here links to before and after videos: https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/79298#issuecomment...
kiawe_fire|4 years ago
This product aside, though, I find it funny how the whole “reactive widget tree that gets rebuilt when data changes” and “everything is just nested objects with properties, no XML needed” trend felt like “backlash” against the UI Builders, Visual Basics, and Glades.
And yet now we’re building visual tools to control all the nested reactive component frameworks very much in that same vein.
InfiniteRand|4 years ago
iddan|4 years ago
sgt|4 years ago
Kind of like a quick way of getting the look you want, and then pasting it back into Android Studio. Even then I'd change and improve the code - I see that the styles are a bit "hard coded" with a variety of fonts I have never seen the need to use.
The UI is a bit laggy on Safari.
GeneralTspoon|4 years ago
sz4kerto|4 years ago
Biggest problem: querying Firebase is problematic. I can bind a collection to a ListView, but in many cases I'd like to map a field to something. For example I have a list of "purchases" and I'd like to map the "buyerId" to an email address. This can't be done, and the generated code is hard to adapt to this kind of use case.
And therein lies the complexity to be honest.
I think it'd worth $30 just as a designer. But you have to be able to code.
abelsm|4 years ago
In this scenario, your collection is "purchases" and there's a "buyerId" field in a purchase document? And you want to get the email from buyerId?
If buyerId is a uid, you can do another query to get the user document from uid and get the email address from that. I may be misunderstanding the question.
OliverGilan|4 years ago
jrm4|4 years ago
canadianfella|4 years ago
[deleted]
offtop5|4 years ago
A big issue here is just how easy flutter is, I'd rather invest 20 hours once to build it using Dart, then to pay $800 a year.
abelsm|4 years ago
It's more than knowing how to code, we've been building with Flutter for a while now, but there's still no way we could have coded FlutterMet in under an hour. It would take us 10 hrs+ to manually do that. But it took <1 hour in FlutterFlow.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXsjnd_4SBo
Also, we allow you to push the generated code to your Github repository, so you don't have to keep paying us once you build your app. :)
tylerhou|4 years ago
$100,000 / 12 * 0.01 == $83.33
(This is a low estimate; the value an engineer delivers to an organization is generally much larger than their compensation.)
It's possible that you believe they should introduce a cheaper tier (hobbyist, open source) with a reduced feature set, but IMO $70 is probably undercharging for most tech corporations.
treis|4 years ago
babaganoosh89|4 years ago
primitivesuave|4 years ago
sgt|4 years ago
petra|4 years ago
I've read about an hospital management system implemented by low-code. So if it can be useful to that complexity levels, maybe the problem isn't technical, but more about marketing, control over the platform, or just general resistance by software developers.
So i wonder, how long do those shifts towards a much higher productivity platform take in the software industry ?
poisonborz|4 years ago
swiley|4 years ago
wpietri|4 years ago
kumarvvr|4 years ago
Flutter for web was just released after a long time in beta stage. It looks like a good language and framework, but I don't see many options for customization. And frankly, the UI composition syntax is tasteless, in my view (Compared to React, which is awesome, or Angular, which is verbose and complex but still understandable)
fakedang|4 years ago
That being said, the jank issues with Flutter on iOS make it a showstopper. And web and Windows Flutter is like in alpha.
tluyben2|4 years ago
As a long term (since the first dev releases of MonoTouch) dev who now uses Flutter, I would almost hysterically scream yes.
We still maintain a lot of Xamarin projects: it is always a bit of a self-peptalk to get started after coming out of Flutter.
cutler|4 years ago
RcouF1uZ4gsC|4 years ago
It is exciting that we might finally be getting there!
pavlov|4 years ago
https://reactstudio.com
axaxs|4 years ago
readonthegoapp|4 years ago
not affiliated, but i do go back every 3 months to find out again that the $50/mo buy-in is too high for my liking.
https://anvil.works/
pjmlp|4 years ago
However there is stuff like OutSystems or Oracle Apex.
By the way Xojo does support WebAssembly.
jordanab|4 years ago
intrasight|4 years ago
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]
xg15|4 years ago
That's great, but how quickly can you:
- get new developers up to speed in an existing product?
- add a new feature to an existing product?
- debug a non-trivial issue?
bkovacev|4 years ago
01walid|4 years ago
anatolinicolae|4 years ago
abelsm|4 years ago
mkw5053|4 years ago
abelsm|4 years ago
What we see a lot of our users do now is push to Github (flutterflow branch), and merge in to their main branch where they have their custom logic.
Gys|4 years ago
fredgrott|4 years ago
My bias, I am not the project lead on flutter Platform widgets but I am one of the lower end contributors.
machello13|4 years ago
gman83|4 years ago
ladyanita22|4 years ago