Flutter Mad Science (conference talk)

hey there folks Philip here and this is another snippet where I'm basically just playing a recording this one is from a conference from uh September uh flutter fireb Festival here in Prague F3 was called and I had a talk uh that was called flutter met science I don't want to spoil it but this is what you would see if you went to the conference and uh it's pretty short and I hope you like it so enjoy oh so yeah uh been introduced my name is Philip raek um Simon can't pronounce my last name which is fine um so uh my name is Phil Ric I was at the floram for a while um and the art team before that and uh but these days I'm here in prag Welcome to My Hometown I hope you like it and uh I do games and open source development but today I want to talk about flut mat science so what do I mean by Ma science in general I think those are the things that are you know like the the cliche thing where there's a met scientists and they have something very impractical but awesome right and uh and sometimes it just so happens that that impractical think later leads to something that's actually very practical uh and so that's what I my talk is all about so wow no um so uh my first what what is flut met science my first met science project that I've ever encountered I think is by wiim leeler which you probably don't remember maybe some of the you do you do cool yes uh props up to yeah whim and he did something that he called perspective on flutter and it's this thing uh that is uh I just converted to dartpad recently and uh it is an app that is rotating in three wait no that's not it that's bad okay sorry yes that's what I was also uh so there's a bug in Dart pad um and I would like to report it right now uh where you have the ID and you don't have okay so we're going to my guest uh we're going to do it the the hard way so this and this if you don't know how to do this by the way this is a learning experience for you for free fre this should work but sometimes it doesn't ah Jesus yes okay yeah and then this should work ID equals this yes yes yes yes pH okay anyway all right so this this actually is about hacking dotpad um no uh so this is um fantastic piece of completely impractical but cool app that whim did in 2018 or 17 I think and it's just a regular you know counter app you all know and love but it's also um a thing that you can rotate right and uh if you look at the code it's very it's basically just you I don't know if you can read this but but there's like a transform and that transform wraps around the default app that's it you know and there's a gesture um uh thing gesture detector to to do the thing and it's obviously super impractical nobody cares but it still works yeah like look at this I can put it here where for example here and I can still click on stuff you know and just just crazy um anyway so you'd think okay so whim spent some time doing this and uh sure he learned a little bit all about flut but otherwise he could have learned about flutter in a probably more efficient way if he just read you know about transform maybe transform something much simpler than a whole app and that would be it right but no he did this mad experiment and it worked and this led to me later to like read his code and be like oh my God this actually works and something connected where I was like oh okay so we have um we have this flutter thing here which I was pretty new to where it doesn't even care if your UI is orthogonal you know it it it it allows you to do things like put the whole app into a rotating perspective piece so that's that's the that's the first two things that this was helpful for but then later I think it was the same year but uh I used it again by knowing that this is possible uh I was privileged enough to be able to tell people at flut life 2018 that it is now possible to show Google Maps in apps right in flutter apps I mean and uh the boring way to do it which would be my way to do it normally uh is to show just you know a screen like oh I can open a screen and it has Google map in it right but instead what I did and I have a video of it because it was televised uh hopefully I can find it yeah is uh is that I had this animated thing uh with myself and then I showed that in that animated thing I can have Google maps running you know and uh people liked it um so um so that worked really well and uh and again I don't think I consciously knew that I'm reusing whims uh Med experiment but I it had to click a few months before that for me to even think of this idea all right so but that's still kind of Impractical so let's go and look at Luca who's here by the way luuka are you yeah um so another mad flutter experience uh experiment is by Luca and now it's not going to work again right oh it's it does oh perfect so you know how we say that uh it's all widgets in flutter right so how about a flutter app with no widgets zero widgets um is that crazy yes it is is that awesome I think so um so you know in normal normal people would have main void Main and then they would have run app in that and a widget right but no Luca is different luuka doesn't want widgets and run up so what he does is uh this is I this is evil but but this is basically he he says uh rendering flutter binding and he binds it to a painter a normal custom painter that you could find in many apps right and then he says schedule biting instance. enture visual update that's it and then I I can show you the custom painter but if you've ever done any custom painter you know this code this just like canvas. draw whatever and that this app so this app literally has zero widget and it works and again is it practical no uh does it you know is anyone going to do this in their real life no of course not but it can connect the dots for you if you read the code and you realize well in one way flutter is it's all widgets but in other ways flutter it's it's all custom painter uh because you you realize oh like if you if you've done some flutter development uh in depth you realize that yeah you can actually do everything that you see in flutter is a custom painter you know it's not really but but like in in the end it it translates to these convas draw calls and that's very helpful when you try to do things like uh I I just recently had to do U like an animated text widget right and you could do it in many ways in flutter but one of the ways is to just basically use draw paragraph canvas. draw paragraph over here and it it just works and then you can of course with paragraph you can measure how big it is and stuff like this so it's all it's all custom painter if on the on the inside or it's all can calls so again it gives you a little bit of insight and there's many other examples I was going to go through all of them but uh I don't think I have the time and I think there's more interesting things to talk about but it can go from things like Matt's uh Star Wars scroll so he made a Star Wars scroll with just a regular list view in perspective right so that there was like an afternoon work then Miguel uh did a flutter 95 basically a recreation of Windows 995 uh uh style and everything so you can build Windows 95 uh apps and then of course there's Simon uh who's who made uh is this a Playstation One game yeah a 3D engine in flutter uh with textures that uh you can uh look around a map from a Playstation One game right and then there are many others but let's talk about me uh uh because not not because um I have the the best U met science experiment but because I know the whole Arc of it right so uh I one of my first projects in flutter was called sci-fi UI and I am a big fan of just futuristic user interfaces in movies and and games and I just thought okay so this flutter thing looks interesting I should give it a try and I um yeah and I implemented in something like two days I took two days and implemented the which is basically uh a an app that uh looks as much as I could make it you know a Sci-Fi thing uh but it's still a scrollable app and it is absolutely not practical no nobody you know took it anywhere I didn't take it definitely anywhere uh and it's it's probably not even even if you took this and made something interesting of it I I don't think it would really work for most people you know because it's too too busy uh but but yeah it exists and um for five years the only practical outcome of these two days was that okay I learned a little bit about you know custom paint uh and animations and stuff like this because it was pretty early in my uh in my flutter Journey uh but otherwise nothing much right it was just some somewhere sitting somewhere in uh on my uh huge GitHub uh page and um just like two or one year ago I Revisited though and made it into something that's not yet ready but you can see it in the partner section where I show off this this game that I call giant robot game where I'm like because it clicked before where I I understood that I don't only need to be a person who likes sci-fi interfaces but I can actually build them then many years later I because it clicked before I was able to to do it so even things like that can uh can lead to really good outcomes all right but let's address the two elephants in the room in terms of met science the first one is Dash and some of you probably know this history better than I do but in 2009 10 uh JavaScript sucked and uh but much worse than now right uh so yeah you could say like oh yeah and it's 2023 and JavaScript still sucks um but but it really sucked and it was moving very slowly it was glacial how it it was uh moving and so some people at Google had this crazy Mad experiment where they said okay you know what we're going to keep working on JavaScript slowly improving it and making it better uh but also we're going to create this new language new programming language that will also run in the browser and it will be faster and it will be made for actual big apps right so it will run faster it will be more structured and so on and so forth and we will call it Dash and uh we'll see how it goes right and then it uh they REM renamed it to Dart and uh it did not work I mean it did work the language did work but uh nobody actually added it to any browsers and for a long time it was a failed mad experiment that didn't lead to any anywhere uh for some for some years Dar was this basically a a bit more involved typescript where it was always translated to JavaScript and it's it's just that was its way but nowadays look at us we're all I think we're all working in Dart and uh Dart has had its um practical use for sure but it looked very dim for a long time and it started as something that a lot of people didn't understand a lot of people didn't think that's it's needed and uh actually a lot of people won't wanted it to fail and then there's sky so that's another weird experiment and again maybe you know the history but this was uh 5 years later 2014 or 15 where a few people at Chrome realized okay so we have been working on making the web faster for the past many many years and now all the all the lwh hanging fruits are gone like it takes us months to make one thing 5% faster just one little thing in in Chrome right um and what if we did this weird experiment where we basically rip everything out of the web that is slow so they just like took the web the platform like HTML JavaScript and they just took away everything that made it slow CSS you know uh and just kept it very focused on just the parts that are actually fast or that can be made fast and again is it is it practical no of course not like how can you even think about removing parts of like big huge chunks of the web just to make it faster like web is made on the promise of backwards compatibility you can't just break it it like it would be like someone saying in flutter uh someone saying you know what we we found out that widgets are slow so no more widgets that that would just not work right so for the web that was the same thing it was very mad experiment and they but they did this this was Adam bar and um Eric Sidell and later I think I Hixon and I'm probably forgetting about other people uh and they did this for two weeks for two weeks they were working on this m experiment and after two weeks they made the whole web something like 60% faster which is crazy like think about what you can do in two weeks they made the web 60% faster and so uh they were like okay so we like we have something here it's definitely better than we expected uh but yeah maybe it's not something for the web itself because yeah you can't just break the web so what they did they they packaged it and they made this little uh portable user interace interace engine and then they just gave it to people and they called it Sky I think I was at the unveiling of sky on Dart Summit 2015 and I remember I was like what's the big deal I didn't see the point of uh rotating rectangle in uh on on Android uh made by FL I'm done by you know Dart but uh it kind of worked and now it's called flutter and again we're all here to to see that it's actually pretty practical so yeah uh so where do where does this all lead uh I hope that I have convinced you that it's okay if you have the inclination to do these weird super impractical mad experiments that you can do it and you should do it because they often not always but they often lead to something that is much more practical and much more useful I know that some people are just not you know interested in this and it's fine but uh if you are don't uh prevent yourself from doing these mad things that I've just shown you and if you lead a team if you are a manager or some something like that uh then I would urge you to let people know that it's okay to sometimes do Mad Science in flutter or anywhere else because these things lead to Innovation and as you know business people Innovation means money right so uh it's just a it's a thing so anyway um thank you for U your attention I as always be excellent to each other uh we're in this big Community not just here but generally you know be excellent to other human beings uh be as mad as you can master and thank you one other thing that I uh I know that you can just I know that there's lunch and stuff so you can just start leaving uh but I bought this specially for this conference and and I started uh getting people to write uh their names on it like you know mait is there and I hope that all the speakers uh will be listed here and I thought it would be cool to have like a little Charity uh how do that how do you say that auction uh so and the way I want to do it I don't want your money but uh the way I want to do it you can come up to me in my booth and you can say you can see this this list and it says Phillip is going to is pledging you know € 10 EUR to Doctors Without Borders and you can be like no actually I Joe or whatever uh play 12 to Transparency International and then if you're the last one on this page by the end of this day you can yeah I'll give you the the thing with all the uh all the famous people on it and uh all I want will want from you afterwards is that you show me that you actually donated the money to the cost that you pledged for so if you if you want to if you want always to like you know give money to Turtles or whatever this is your chance to actually also get some some schol swag from it anyway yeah all [Applause] right

Channel: Filip Hráček

Views: 2,325

Keywords: flutter, programming, keynote

Id: ESqXNHWtONE

Length: 21min 40sec (1300 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 16 2024