I want to love Flutter. But once looking at it, it's a no go. It's the new flash. Really, you cannot copy the text anymore. React native is my goto solution now.
I can see it being useful for games and similar where there isn't really any UI but even then I would want dialogs and similar to use regular text that I can copy.
I am definitely not looking forward to flutter on the web. I foresee a lot of websites that I will need to avoid.
The only thing I do get is that you’d want open in new tab and copyable links. However, that’s hard from a developer perspective as you have to make sure you create links that store all data needed to rebuild the same UI in the same “conceptual” context but a different underlying data context (logged in user may be different, data may have changed so some saved context has become stale). You’ll likely end up spending an awful lot of time to cater for all the unexpected things that may happen when someone just clicks a link copied from the address bar or a link by another user 2 days before, that may have been the result of that second user clicking through 10 levels deep in your app with all sorts of filters and options based on the state of data at that exact time two days before the first user clicks the link. Obviously you can’t show them the data from two days ago, but what if the data is still there but the path to get there is different? Does it conceptually still make sense to show the data and perhaps some breadcrumbs showing the new path? Or should you just say sorry that data isn’t here anymore? That depends entirely on what the data is and what you’re users are trying to do, so you can’t build one-size-fits-all technical solutions for this (if that were even possible). How are you ever going to reliably rebuild the UI and context that the first user intended to share by copying the link without spending huge amounts of time? That requires actual business logic and functional design.
For a lot of apps, it may make more sense to just have a share button in some places where you actually and intentionally support this (and where it will be actually used by a substantial number of users). Less time spent on developing things that are hugely complex and very little used (on average per state for ALL your different UI states that you have links to somewhere in the app, even if it’s a typical line-of-business master-detail form with some filters for the master list and a details segment with a dialog box or expanded element showing additional details of a certain property).
No, there are a few exceptions, but mostly yes. And I'm sure more than just the exceptions will use Flutter which is why I'm not looking forward to it.
> How many times have you wanted to save an image or copy text from a UI element in a native app?
Often. I mean not necessarily from a UI element but a lot of the time I want to get an image from a native app and can't.
> How many times have you been frustrated in a web app that when you search using the browser you are getting results from UI elements or “app chrome” instead of the actual content that the web app is displaying?
Almost never. There are rarely many extra results. In fact I already am bothered far more often when websites hijack Ctrl-F (I do not understand why browsers allow this) and fail to search the entire page. With flutter this will become the norm and I am not looking forward to it.
> Isn’t it enough to have some fields with content a user actually would want to copy/search
No, it isn't. I regularly copy things that people didn't expect. If it is just to send someone instructions how to use the app. In fact Android has automatic copy based on OCR from the app switcher and I use that a couple of times a day. There is already too much uncopyable text around. For example all messaging apps on android appear to only support copying the full message. This is what happens when you let people mess with standard UX patterns, they break them!
> You’ll likely end up spending an awful lot of time to cater for all the unexpected things that may happen when someone just clicks a link copied from the address bar
Good! I love apps with great links. It makes them so much easier to use. I don't need to go through their custom navigation to get to my favourite pages. I can use the browser navigation that I already know and love. Also I can share links to my friends! Maybe I can help people use the app better!
You just described a bunch of problems that I already have! Especially on mobile devices. This is why I hope that Flutter on web doesn't take off. We will be making all of those annoyances more common! You seem to think that you can predict all of my use cases and provide the share button manually right when I need it. However product developers on a time crunch often miss or skip use cases so it is much better to have supported by default (like text find/copy that can be disabled) than hope that a developer will think, and find time, to implement them. And if URLs encourage people to make it possible to save and share the state of their app then I think that is a good thing!
Now, out of the many considerations we had, in this process, "cannot copy the text" is... well, I have no idea what you are talking about. Are you referring to not being able to do this in a EditableText widget, and if so, have to tried a `TextField` with `enableInteractiveSelection: true`?
I mean, there should be hugely more important development concerns when evaluating these things, than... a brief rejection based on something as trivial as that. Then again, I won't presume to know your situation or the criteria you had. But it does strike me as a bit... shallow reasoning.
I can say, that for our case, the dependency hell that you more easily get with React Native was what put me off completely.
> Yup. I would also like to open links in new tabs, view images, copy links, search on page, use browser extensions...
Throwing away all platform conventions is a very heavy-handed and user-unfriendly way of bringing about portability.
Another triviality, for example is the behaviour of scroll chaining as compared to my browser: In Flutter, as soon as the inner scrollable hits its boundary, the outer scrollable takes over, while the expected behaviour for me would be for the outer scroll to not move until I reposition the mouse.
It's exactly the same as Microsoft's Windows 8 fiasco, by unifying the experience across platforms every one of them felt broken and contrived, and this effect is even more notable if your application deals with a more diverse user-platform ecosystem. Your app will be the odd one out that works strangely compared to everything else in every system.
However, I believe "this is a website" or "this is an app" is a perspective the user will take, despite what our intentions as creators were, and so, the safest bet would always be assume what is the norm for the platform, since the user would never be "disappointed" by that even if they expected an app-like feel. On the Web, (at least some, in my anecdata most) people expect to see Websites, even if highly interactive ones.
I have not tested Flutter in a mobile application so I wouldn't be able to tell if it feels par to the course with other mobile applications, so it might be viable if you only need "Android<>iOS" portability.
I'm also not entirely convince that native apps with flutter is a good thing, especially considering that I'll be just another attempt at providing an opinionated UX stack that is completely different from that of the native experience.
So, maybe we agreed more than we thought. I also believe that a native experience, one that matches the otherwise existing UI interactions should be king. Throwing App UX paradigms into website or desktop app bound to feel terrible. Maybe it can be made more enjoyable to use with better configurations more in line with the respective platforms.
It's not trivial.
Now I'm thinking of all the ways I could get screwed here.
* Not being able to copy transactions from my bank account
* Not being able to easily send text to a read-later service (not sure if this necessarily depends on selectable text, but who knows, maybe selectable means the text isn't visible to these services now)
* Not being able to easily copy something that needs entering into another page
This reminds of sites that try really hard to NOT allow password managers, or even allowing pasting of text into form fields.
Pass.
Web: defaults to selectable
Flutter on Web: defaults to Flutter, not Web
Most of the time a dev isn't thinking "I'd better make this selectable," because they simply aren't going to think of all the reasons someone might select text. They'll think of the obvious-to-them cases, and leave all the other text as unselectable.
It's like if you made spoiler 50/50. Do you want to see this without clicking?
I think we really overlook the thought that had gone into making js, and other open tech.
I truly think my random clicking on paragraphs that I'm approaching isn't just ADHD but a way of helping my eyes stay on track. It's very disconcerting when the text doesn't select. (As, clearly, all these comments noticed as well -- why were we all trying to select the text? To check if it's Flash-ish, of course, but also we just like things to grab onto while we read.)
Or even translating...
Try putting their demo website in Google Translate or even try to select the text on an email in their demo webmail app to copy paste it in google translate ....
Most users don't open devtools to workaround this (Safari doesn't even enable devtools by default). While it's annoying when developers get it wrong (put "user-select: none" on things that should be selectable), this changes very little for the vast majority of web users.
"This thing that will noticeably make your web experience worse won't affect John over there, so why are you complaining" is not the best response.
I like to be able to override developer decisions about what text is and isn't selectable, and Flutter basically makes that impossible.
I'm looking over this thread, nobody has said that they're in a majority. We're just saying that Flutter's default behavior is bad for us, and that it encourages developers to make bad choices about text, and that it's pretty demonstrable that the average Flutter app has less selectable text than the average web app in general.
The fact that many companies will not care about this when weighing the technology is exactly why we're complaining. Because we don't want the web to suddenly become unusable for us just because we're in a minority of users.
It still doesn't make me feel any better or make me any less likely to complain to hear that my problems don't affect everyone else. It's not addressing the criticism, or explaining why I shouldn't be upset about Flutter's decision, or explaining why the current situation on the web is equivalent. It's just a polite way of saying, "yes this will affect you, but we don't care because we don't think you can do anything about it."
And yeah, it's probably true that this issue in specific is not going to cause Flutter to fail (there are plenty of other problems with Flutter on the web that will do that), but does that fact change anything about whether or not widespread Flutter adoption would make my web experience worse?
I know Flutter is working on accessibility, but they have already made choices that are counter to the default expectations web users have. And are having to work to fix the accessibility issues they introduced by not adhering to web standards and/or best practices to begin with.
Don't want to restart the entire thread that already existed, but I rarely check comments and just saw this.
https://api.flutter.dev/flutter/material/SelectableText-clas...
Seems like every dev using Flutter for more than a few days would know that both `Text` and `SelectableText` exist and pick the one that's relevant to whatever kind of text they're adding. At that point, it's the dev's fault for making a conscious decision to make text selectable or not (if they choose wrong); not really the language's.
Not only is this making it easy for app developers to do the wrong thing ("I will just put some text here and make it unselectable, that is going to be great UX") but even worse, it is the default?
There are going to be some unintended consequences here, I suspect.
This reminds me of those websites that use javascript to preventing pasting into password fields "because security", thus breaking everyone's password managers, and making everyone less secure in the process ("if I have to type in that password every time, I'd better choose something simple I can remember...").
So, what about accessibility? If the text is not accessible, how are screen readers going to work?Vision impaired people are just going to have to ... do what, exactly? Will they have to apply OCR to access the content of a Flutter app?
This really reminds me of what was so sucky about Flash. I guess we'll get lots of little walled gardens that make basic interaction via text deliberately difficult. This feels like the opposite of the open web.
This feedback you get here will only get worse with time, and it will block adoption.
If the goal of the environment is to provide a new standard for cross-platform development, your default behaviors are extremely important decisions.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google but not related to Flutter.)
However I think the decision to make text selection opt-in makes sense from the context of an application that targets web.
For example, if you open up your mail app or Slack, you will find that a lot of text on the screen isn't selectable. For example, you can't select the text of the tabs on your browser.
If all text was selectable by default for an app, it may cause unexpected results rather than having the develop opt-in to deciding what is selectable. We have many widgets in our app that we wouldn't want selectable for UX reasons.
In practice, it hasn't been much effort for us to make things selectable. Just need to replace a Text widget with a SelectableText widget.
Isn't this a feature? Having text easy to copy and paste is a copyright problem for many sites. Same with being able to save full-resolution images. It's pretty common to see a copy/paste in forum comments to get around a paywall.
IMO either this or some other webassembly view is the future, simply because it's great DRM. Sure, you can circumvent it, but most people cannot.
I should make my position more clear: I hate this stuff with a passion. But, big business wants better content protection, and big money always gets what it wants - very few exceptions there. I wish we could do something as technologists who want to keep these features of the web; but against trillion dollar companies I know who I'd bet for...