Early Impressions
Flutter first caught my attention while it was still in alpha, around 2017. By then I had already worked with Xamarin, looked closely at RubyMotion and Felgo, and become enamoured with FireMonkey. Flutter immediately struck me as something worth watching.
In 2019 I decided to take it more seriously and build something real.
Temperaments
On 5 July 2019, I released Temperaments to the Google Play Store. The application helps users explore the traditional four temperaments and includes the text and questionnaire from Fr. Conrad Hock's The Four Temperaments, together with additional writings and audio interviews.
It was also an early entrant in Flutter's It's All Widgets showcase — although it is showing its age now.
Building it
There was little friction in going from experimentation to a finished application.
I didn't spend months learning Flutter before starting. I pulled knowledge on demand as the application required it. Documentation and examples were readily available, and packages already existed for things I needed, including audio playback and image viewing.
Flutter made it straightforward to build attractive interfaces, while Dart felt immediately approachable coming from languages such as C#, C++ and Java.
Even publishing the resulting application to the Play Store was relatively painless.
Why Flutter still interests me
What originally attracted me to Flutter remains interesting today: it was designed for modern user interfaces from the outset.
The same basic model can address interfaces of different shapes and scales, making Flutter interesting not only for mobile applications but also for desktop, web, embedded and edge-facing software.
Dart is interesting in its own right. It is concise, familiar to developers from the C-family of languages, and capable of serving across more than just the UI layer.
I haven't needed Flutter for my recent work, but it remains a technology I'd happily reach for when the right problem calls for it.
Flutter really is something special.