2017-08-14 22:11 UTC Flutter: So what'd I miss?
Flutter's first big app launched this past Friday, the official Hamilton app!
The app was written by an agency (goposse.com), but we (the Flutter team) helped them in the last few weeks to solve some problems they found with the framework. Mostly the big problem we ran into was around performance of rounded corner clips, but we were able to resolve those issues before launch. We also tracked down some hit testing issues. My favourite bug was with hit testing on tab bars.
We have code to make sure that when you fling a list, if you tap the list while it's scrolling, you don't actually trigger whatever's under the list, instead, you stop the list. This makes sense, because otherwise you have no way to stop the list without triggering random buttons.
Separate from this, we have code to make sure that when you change tabs, we scroll the tab you picked into view over a fixed period (about 300ms if I recall correctly).
Now, what happens when the tab is already in view? Well, we started this 300ms animation that... does nothing. It scrolled by zero pixels over 300ms. And since a scroll was happening, while that was going on you couldn't tap another tab (because the first tap was just stopping the animation). So this meant that if you tapped back and forth between two tabs, it did the first, then dropped the next tap, then did the third, then dropped the fourth, etc! Not a good user experience.
It was tricky to figure out what was going on, because when we looked at the dumps, we could see an animation was happening, but it wasn't immediately obvious that the animation was over zero distance. Luckily we were able to use some of our debug flags to narrow it down.
The fix ended up being really simple (about two lines, plus many dozens of lines of tests): just make sure that if you animateTo() a position you've already reached, do nothing!
Now that we've proved it's possible to ship a big app with flutter, our next step is to fill in the big holes: internationalization (mostly meaning localization and right-to-left support in layout), inline video, improving low-end phone performance, documentation of the animation system, that kind of thing.
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