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Comment by dwaite | Hacker News Reader

> but I know that's down to the developer so I won't hold that against Flutter.

That is absolutely an issue with Flutter, which throws away the underlying platform UX and draws to a canvas. It gives you relatively few tools to target "native look" controls for each platform without maintaining multiple UIs in parallel composed of entirely different widgets.

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Typically people just make the app look and work the same in all platforms, like how you might expect a responsive web app to be like; no one is implementing Notion with a platform specific UI, for example, using Apple stuff on Apple devices or Windows stuff on Windows devices.

> the underlying platform UX and draws to a canvas

Frame buffer? Canvas is the javascript term.

It's not specific nor limited to javascript. The term "canvas" in this context is much older and seems to be used across many platforms.

Random examples from the (desktop) Java/Android/iOS world where the same semantics is used:

https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/java/awt/Canvas.ht...

https://developer.android.com/reference/android/graphics/Can...

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/SwiftUI/Canvas

You may notice that the first reference is from java, and i bet js lifted it from there. They may have been aware of java because they lifted the name too.

The other two are too new to be relevant.

Flutter uses canvas when targeting the web. (At least it was the last time I looked at it years ago)

Canvas is the javascript name for writing directly to a frame buffer :)

There is a world outside the browser. For now.

Canvas predates javascript. For example, TCL's TK toolkit uses Canvas[1]

[1] https://tkdocs.com/tutorial/canvas.html

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