whiplashoo
Joined 11 years ago
Karma
808
Submissions
37
Member since
Jan 25
Recent submissions
Comment · 2 years ago
Comment · 3 years ago
Last year, I built a desktop app with Flutter with native-looking UI, for both macOS and Windows: https://blog.whidev.com/native-looking-desktop-app-with-flut...
Indeed, multi-window support is absolutely missing right now, but it's the Flutter's team top priority. Context menus are now available with 3.7.
Generally, I found Flutter/Dart easy to pick up and build a quality desktop app with ease. Currently, I am not convinced that it can be used for performance-critical apps yet without a lot of developer effort and experience (there is, for example, Rows, an Excel clone built with Flutter). However, it works for building general-purpose apps on desktop, without messing with the native toolkits that are in a strange place, especially on Windows.
Comment · 4 years ago
Even if you can spot a non-native app in seconds, does it really matter? The vast majority of users simply won't notice and not care at all if it's native or built with Flutter, Xamarin, RN, etc.
The same has been said for Electron on desktop for years, but look at how VS Code is probably the top editor in use on desktop platforms, and even more demanding audience, like developers, don't really care that it's non-native.
Comment · 5 years ago
I wrote another relevant post, if you are interested: https://blog.whidev.com/same-features-macos-to-windows-with-...
Comment · 5 years ago
Plan to port this to Linux as well! Haven't look a lot about the available UI design option, but this could be useful: https://pub.dev/packages/yaru
Comment · 5 years ago
Thanks for the kind words!
Building can be a hassle, as you can only produce the release version on the host machine. This means there is a bit of back and forth between my Windows laptop and my iMac, but it's expected.
I haven't looked for an automation process for this, but I believe Codemagic are building a solution for Flutter desktop as well: https://blog.codemagic.io/codemagic-ci-cd-releases-support-f...
Comment · 5 years ago
Will check it out, thanks for the feedback!
It was mainly born out of my need to re-learn a lot of hotkeys when switching from using Windows to macOS. I wanted an easy way to record and keep all the new shortcuts I learned every day in one place.