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Comment by lazypenguin | Hacker News Reader

I have an irrational annoyance when projects claim to support "desktop UI" but then only have the most trivial of widgets commonly used in desktop applications. Where is my tree view? Data grid view? Charts? Native file dialog window?

From my perspective, while I'm sure Flutter is wonderful, it fits squarely in the "mobile" UI toolkit and "basic" desktop application category.

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Hey there! I work on Flutter for desktop. I'm happy to provide a little background.

We made a decision early on to focus where those of us who work on Flutter could deliver the most value, and for Desktop that meant getting the runtimes and platform integration for each of the desktop OSes in good shape (international text input, accessibility support, rendering performance, etc.) as well as core integrations like the menu bar, file chooser dialogs, etc. These are things that need to land in the runtime itself and are significantly more painful for the community to contribute, or author and publish on pub.dev.

We're working on filling in the gaps for widgets that are part of the Material spec, and I expect the community to make and publish widgets on pub.dev that continue to surprise me; I'm blown away time and time again at the beautiful widgets and the community continues to produce either in packages or as pull requests. You should be able to find community-authored packages for treeview, datagrid, and charting on pub.dev today in the meantime.

With limited resources you have to choose. If flutter focused on UI elements before Mac OS + Linux stability, the top comment would be "Flutter is a solid option for Windows but without Linux or Mac support it is useless."

The flutter team has proven generally capable of developing UI elements on mobile across iOS/Android. Getting platform stability is a welcome step and i trust them to continue to build out the desktop element set.

Flutter has been my go-to for mobile app dev for years and i haven't considered returning to react native, pure native or cordova since i swapped.

All that being said, i have spent my afternoon debugging an issue with Flutter's first-party camera plugin, so it isn't all roses.

Even Apple's own declarative SwiftUI framework looks like it trails far behind covering rich, comprehensive AppKit apps: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/swiftui/building_a....

You can integrate appkit components into a swiftui app though.

This is a big gripe I have with WinUI. How on earth do you create a desktop UI framework that lacks something as basic as a tableview/data grid… it's only slightly less bad than a UI framework not having a button widget. One should not need to import a third party dependency or write your own for something so basic.

I'd love to see a "Back to the Future" desktop UI toolkit that has roughly the capabilities of AppKit circa 2003 but in a modern language, clean unified API, cross-platform, with seamless native UI integration, and of course not carrying hundreds of megabytes of Chromium gunk in each app like Electron does.

That would be wonderful. AppKit is the closest to perfect I've found in desktop UI frameworks. If it took some of the improvements found in UIKit and was cross platform I'd never use anything else.

not carrying hundreds of megabytes of Chromium gunk in each app like Electron does. this problem has been solved multiple times, see e.g. Tauri

Well I think all of these widgets are available on pub.dev. For example, I'm using the charts_flutter plugin: https://google.github.io/charts/flutter/gallery.html

I think a tree view was promised (listed on a presentation) when Flutter 2.0 was released, but no details were provided, and I haven't heard of it ever since.

You might be thinking of this package, authored by Google, mostly by people on the Flutter team but it's not an official Flutter project (as far as I know): https://pub.dev/packages/flutter_simple_treeview

(Disclaimer: I work on the Flutter team.)

who builds desktop applications anymore? it feels weird to say but i am starting to like them again after transitioning to basically 100% thin client/cloud services for the past 15 years.

I’m confused, do you not use desktop apps?

How many new desktop apps do you use (first released in the past ~5 years or so), and how many of them aren't Electron?

Desktop GUI software is a pretty small niche. The web has eaten nearly everything, and games don't use native UI stuff.

yes, the only market for new apps would be CLI, games and scientific computing/technical niches

The post I replied to implied that the rate of production of them is decreasing, and you are claiming this too. I’m not convinced about that.

I did in the early days when the web sucked, then dhtml and web2.0 started and I completely swapped. Now I'm starting to again. I like them more the web apps. But no one is making them anymore

What qualifies as a "desktop application" these days?

Is it any application designed primarily to work on a laptop or desktop form factor? A web application like SketchUp would qualify.

Is it an application whose code is only stored locally, even if they don't work well with a laptop/desktop form factor? Any number of native mobile apps would qualify.

What about a PWA that is cached locally but initially loaded via a URL?

I don't consider electron apps or any thin veneer over some javascript to be a desktop app.

I also don't consider native phone/tablet apps to be desktop apps

> I don't consider electron apps or any thin veneer over some javascript to be a desktop app.

So VSCode isn't a desktop app?

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