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Comment by xrd | Hacker News Reader

This looks super exciting. As an Android developer who has not yet built a Flutter app, I'm intrigued if this can be a stepping stone to ramping up on flutter.

I looked over the video. It is nice to see a compressed video, but it was still hard to understand what to pay attention to inside a 20 minute video. It would be great if you added callouts to the important moments so people could easily jump to the important items.

Is Firebase a requirement? I tried to create a sample app and was immediately told I needed to setup Firebase. I didn't see a way to skip that step, but perhaps it is because I used a sample template? I would prefer to use GraphQL as a backend, and am not sure if the full Firebase stack (auth, storage, realtime) are used, or if you can swap pieces in and out when desired.

Congratulations on your launch!

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Highly recommend the appbrewery flutter bootcamp (it’s a video course). It’s $10 and will get you up and running quickly. I have no affiliation with them other than as a happy customer.

I took it last year, the woman has a mesmerizing voice! (and the course is great too :D) If you're an experienced software dev it's a bit basic.

I like Flutter a lot, but I'm not a fan of Dart. It's a false friend, it makes you believe it's simple and mostly a copy of your favorite language, but once you start to dig a little deeper it feels like something bolted on, hacky, not designed.

I come from the .net world which is the exact opposite: C# is a superb language but every UI framework MS has ever produced is sub par. Now if I could get Flutter with C# I would be a happy man.

Flutnet[1] - either a dream come true, or a nightmare. [1] https://www.flutnet.com/

I don't really get this. Both Flutter and Xamarin are hybrid frameworks. Mixing them up just seems ..... pointless. What's there to be gained?

Wow I never encountered Flutnet before. It's more of a nightmare IMHO, my goal moving to flutter was to avoid Xamarin in the first place!

Huh. I really enjoy Dart and found a lot of it very elegant. What about it did you not like?

yes, we've been writing a lot of Dart over the last couple of years and also enjoy it quite a lot. interested in hearing what issues GP faced.

Of course it's highly subjective but here are a few examples:

There's too much syntactic sugar for my taste to the point it gets diabetic.

Callable classes really? For example you can write MyClass()();

Underscore to mark a variable or a function private, but you can still use an underscore to declare a variable inside a function so it muddles the comprehension. Are we going to lose some precious milliseconds if we have to write private in front of a variable?

There's also the need to use buildrunner for almost everything since the language wasn't thought out for modern use cases. It works, but this is very inelegant IMHO. When I peak at the generated code I don't feel fluent in Dart quite the opposite.

Then there's the ultra strict linter that won't let me add an empty new line where I want. The resulting code is very compact and is harder to read.

I am slowly trying to make this happen https://hydro-sdk.io/

Just learn native flutter and dart. If you cant learn a new lang, you shouldn't be developing.

I took the Appbrewery course and it seemed extremely basic and also not updated for latest Flutter versions. I found the free Flutter Apprentice on Ray Wenderlich site much better.

@abelsm i also tried out your sample app https://app.flutterflow.io/run/ByqwG33rw80qyN39ooNq and think i found a small bug - when i go to customize my name before joining, and hit Continue, nothing happens.

Thanks! Many of our users have found it to be a good way to learn Flutter basics :)

Firebase is not required, but it is the easiest way to get started. We also support 3rd party API integrations, so that users are free to use whatever backend they prefer.

if you are coming from Android native dev, its not as deep of learning curve...

Think of it this way, where Android has every view as stateful or stateless, instead in Flutter it's broken up into Stateful widgets and stateless widgets.

The only increase in time is that in the data binding side as it's not prettied up with libraries that automate that side.

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