FlutterFlow: Low-code Flutter apps(flutterflow.io) |
FlutterFlow: Low-code Flutter apps(flutterflow.io) |
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
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.
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?
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.
- 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?
Your backgrounds [1] seem very solid so why not showcase it?
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.
am always interested in how companies transition from a deep build phase into a build-and-market-what-you've-already-built phase.
in terms of our team, we're looking to bring on a community manager and a content strategist.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. :)
It's a great tool for MVP scenarios and especially in business contexts that price tag is entire negligible compared to the hourly rate of most engineers! So a single hour saved will already make up for it.
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)
That being said, the jank issues with Flutter on iOS make it a showstopper. And web and Windows Flutter is like in alpha.
Would love more context around this statement because I would have assumed the exact opposite, especially when you have to use a completely different language.
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.
It is exciting that we might finally be getting there!
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/open-source
(Founder here, confirming that this is a Supported Use Case :-P)
However there is stuff like OutSystems or Oracle Apex.
By the way Xojo does support WebAssembly.
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?
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.
My bias, I am not the project lead on flutter Platform widgets but I am one of the lower end contributors.
0: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/google-pay-save-pay-manage/id1...
1: https://developers.googleblog.com/2020/09/google-pay-picks-f...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26333213
Back then at least one of the "featured" apps had key screens written in e.g. ObjC. Google Pay was also discussed.
Apple SwiftUI for iOS & macOS.
Flutter for Android, Windows, Linux and possibly a web client.
Wouldn't Jetpack Compose make more sense for these platforms? It is native for Android and is similar to flutter for web and desktop.
I do like the idea of only maintaining a single codebase, but of course it comes with significant trade offs. The idea of building for Apple-first but automatically getting a reasonable fallback for other platforms is quite appealing - as you say, for many businesses it probably makes sense to focus on having the most polished iOS experience possible.
Honestly I’ve been quite impressed with the end results we’ve got from React Native, but you are always going to be lagging behind the native platform.
A native strategy for ios is absolutely worth the investment of resources and time and flutter will never cut it or be worth the risk of even a small % of users suffering some new bug.
Android gets whatever is quick and easy just to to keep the business ticking on that side so flutter is perfect.
Users do not and should not have to care or be exposed to your cost saving strategy.
https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/21445
https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/31865#issuecomment...
https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/33833#issuecomment...
I think Flutter Team (and most ppl at Google) are entirely focused on pushing out new features which they can cite on their performance review docs to get higher pay. Few of them focus on user needs. This is why Flutter built Web and Desktop support before finishing Mobile. Flutter Mobile things left undone: no high-quality location module, long-standing bug in camera module on Android, missing Cupertino widgets, a few missing Material widgets (date-time picker), critical info missing from docs, and missing non-trivial examples.
https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/32170#issuecomment...
Comment here links to before and after videos: https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/79298#issuecomment...
Anything over $50 becomes a line item in my budget, I can't justify spending $50 a month in the hobbyist space. It's a great idea, I just don't think I can really afford it.
$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.
It's for a hobby $70 is a bit hard to justify.
second of all flutterflow (and other code-exporting builders like webflow) generates code you can take over, so it can even be helpful to people who could code it themselves, all it has to do is save some substantial time, which as a UI builder myself a WYSIWYG tool always does.
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 ?
The biggest benefit I see from the low code movement is, what I hope, will be a trend in bespoke apps where devs like myself spend less time building a single user experience and more time architecting a cohesive system with bespoke “low code” tools on top, that can help enable non-engineer power users to then work within that business-specific framework to craft the screens and user experiences that the masses then use.
Essentially a way to keep the devs doing more actual engineering and architecture work while the more accessible things like “move this button” or “create a screen that shows this data we already have” can be made more accessible to more people.
That said, I think general purpose low code solutions meant for all businesses and industries will be more for the MVP / rapid prototyping stages for the most part.
But I could well be proven wrong!
Works perfectly well for 90% of most businesses.
Thanks for bringing them to my notice.
if you'd like to chat with me on content strategy, you have my email :)
In this podcast, Eric one of the original flutter guys,said desktop and web started by other team with in google. https://twitter.com/darkofabijan/status/1392061926407028740
Teams from Sony, Toyota and Samsung(Tizen) are giving flutter a go on their own. Also the ubuntu guys are active committers to progress flutter desktop.
Flutter devex is also faster and more responsive, but it just doesn't quite make as a good of a product on iOS. iOS users are higher revenue and have higher standards than android users also.
Nobody focuses on windows or linux desktop, so it will be decent enough for them too. Google effectively owns the browser with chrome and flutter and chrome both use skia as their render system, so the likelihood of long standing bugs between them are reduced further.
Apple doesn't like it when their biggest direct competitor tries to commoditize them, and are not a money maker like games, so they foot drag in subtle ways to make flutter not as good of a thing.
I use iOS personally, so there is also a built in skill component there.
If the company got really big, then I would probably do a native web UI because web developers are easy to hire relative to many other types.
I tried it on macOS as well as on the iOS simulator and on the web, but I haven't tried the latest version yet. You can try the web version here:
https://gallery.flutter.dev/#/demo/cupertino-text-field
Edit: I have now tried the latest version (2.2) and I'm seeing 12% CPU usage for an idle app with nothing but a focused TextField.