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Comment by skratlo | Hacker News Reader

Yay, Macromedia Flash for desktop is here, made in Google, Dart instead of ActionScript, wow, just wow.

I assume that this is meant as a criticism, but Flash was quite good at easy-to-make portable graphical apps; they had massive security issues and some lack of polish, but there's a reason why Flash dominated its era. (Also, "Macromedia Flash for desktop" was already a thing, no?) So yeah, "Flash but modern and safe" would be a pretty strong selling point.

There was just a thread bemoaning the lost art of Flash games last week:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23705174

Flash remains the most productive UI development environment I have had over the past twenty years. Getting graphical apps working on all major platforms is a fabulous achievement by the Flutter folks.

I have no love for what Android has become and where Kotlin is going. The web today feels like a PDF...huge amounts of movement but not necessarily progress.

I hope more than anything that Flutter continues to gain traction. To my mind it is perfectly reasonable for next generation tech to write to the canvas with the latest widgets as long as there is good accessibility support.

Yes, but this time it will work on Apple products.

You're not wrong.

I think they're mostly wrong. I think we put too much stock into the default UI toolkits on each platform since this really isn't much different than how GTK and QT work. They have their own rendering engines and have to draw all their widgets from scratch just like this. The only difference is that GTK and QT are blessed.

I think there's a case to be made for sticking to the defaults for consistency's sake but Flutter is just as native as any other UI toolkit on Linux.

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