Flutter.io

Just ran across this new framework thing : http://flutter.io/

Flutter is a new way to build high-performance, cross-platform mobile apps. Flutter is optimized for today’s, and tomorrow’s, mobile devices. We are focused on low-latency input and high frame rates on Android and iOS.

Had to read quite a ways down the FAQ to see this :

Why is Google building Flutter?

As Eric Schmidt has said: “Mobile won.” We noticed that too many teams were slowed down by building the same app twice: once for Android and once for iOS. Hiring two separate teams is costly: knowledge isn’t shared, code is duplicated, keeping two apps in sync is challenging. We are building Flutter to make it easier and faster for teams to deliver great mobile apps for both iOS and Android.

##What are the origins of Flutter?
Back in 2014, some engineers in Google took a step back to ask, “What would a modern mobile-first rendering engine look like?” Without worrying about backwards compatibility, or desktop concerns, or legacy constraints, they started coding a new engine named Sky. Encouraged by some of their initial performance measurements, they decided to make the experiment a real project and renamed it Flutter. In 2015, internal teams inside of Google started to take notice and began building apps on Flutter, and the flutter.io site was born.

##Does Google use Flutter?
Yes. Even though Flutter itself is open source, the apps built on Flutter are not yet public. Stay tuned!

What’s interesting about all of this, is that it’s all built in Dart. It kind of feels like this is dart trying to find it’s killer app, and being a friendlier midpoint between between web and mobile projects is a pretty good angle.

That API looks eerily similar to famous…

It’s Dart though, and pretty OS X workflowy. The first command in Getting Started is brew. Haha.

I don’t feel like switching from Arch Linux to OS X just to try to get it working to possibly see a demo.

Flutter isn’t for the Web; it runs in a native Dart VM (look for “How does Flutter run my code on Android?” or “How does Flutter run my code on iOS?”).

Interesting, joe. From the FAQ:

Does Flutter run on the web?
No. We do not plan to provide a web version of Flutter.

The Flutter team has hacked the crap out of chromium to make its rendering more performant, so I don’t think it is compatible with the web anymore.