As leaders in the technology and application development space for over 15 years, we know these decisions should not be taken lightly. There are many factors to consider and each company will have different needs and thus will need different solutions.  

Let’s investigate the options and the pros and cons associated with each.  

What is .NET MAUI and How Does It Relate to Xamarin? 

As Xamarin reaches its end of life, Microsoft has introduced .NET MAUI as a replacement. MAUI is an evolution of Xamarin.Forms, focusing on enhancing developer experience through quality, performance, design, and platform availability. It absorbs Xamarin.Android and Xamarin.iOS into the .NET framework, aligning with Microsoft’s vision of running .NET on any platform. .NET 6 marks the beginning of this transition, taking over for Xamarin building Android, iOS, and cross-platform applications. 

The introduction of .NET MAUI provides an opportunity for developers and organizations to reassess whether .NET remains the best fit for their mobile projects. With contenders like Flutter and React Native gaining popularity, it is essential to consider if migrating from Xamarin to .NET MAUI is the most suitable choice. 

.NET MAUI aims to improve upon Xamarin.Forms by rewriting UI components for better performance and extensibility. The framework focuses on reducing app launch times and decoupling UI components from their platform counterparts. This allows developers to use the correct component for each platform without specifying it explicitly, resulting in a more seamless and efficient development process. 

MAUI drastically improves the developer experience by introducing a unified project structure instead of separate projects per platform. Platform-specific code can now be added to a “Platforms” folder within the unified project. This change simplifies project organization and makes it easier to manage code across different platforms. Additionally, MAUI provides abstractions around commonly used platform features, such as permissions, communication, and device-specific features like geolocation and media pickers. These abstractions help reduce the amount of platform-specific code required, further streamlining the development process. 

Hot reloading for XAML and C# is available in MAUI, allowing developers to see changes in the app’s UI in real-time. While some developers have reported inconsistent performance with hot reloading, it remains a valuable feature that can significantly speed up the development process. When bundled, the C# code is compiled into native code, with different compilation processes for Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows apps, ensuring optimal performance on each platform. 

Microsoft supports .NET MAUI alongside the open-source community, indicating a strong commitment to improving the framework based on developer feedback. This collaboration ensures that .NET MAUI continues to evolve and adapt to the needs of developers and organizations. 

Migration from Xamarin to .NET MAUI 

Migrating from Xamarin to .NET MAUI involves several steps, including upgrading Xamarin.Android and Xamarin.iOS projects to the latest stable .NET release and updating Xamarin.Forms projects to .NET MAUI. Microsoft provides command-line tools and Visual Studio plugins to automate many code transformations during the migration process. These tools can save time and effort, making the migration process smoother and more manageable. 

The most extensive part of the upgrade involves updating the UI, which may require namespace and API changes. Depending on the complexity of the existing UI and the use of third-party UI elements, this process can vary in difficulty. Microsoft has collaborated with major Xamarin UI component builders to ensure compatibility with MAUI, helping to streamline the migration process. 

Disadvantages of .NET MAUI 

While .NET MAUI offers several advantages as a cross-platform solution, it also comes with some disadvantages that developers and organizations should consider before adopting it for their projects. 

One significant disadvantage of using .NET MAUI is its relatively new status in the market. As an evolution of Xamarin.Forms, MAUI may still have some growing pains and unresolved issues. Developers might encounter bugs or limitations that could impact their project’s development timeline and overall stability. Although Microsoft supports .NET MAUI, it might take time for the framework to mature and reach the same level of stability and reliability as more established alternatives like React Native or Flutter. 

Another potential drawback of .NET MAUI is its reliance on the .NET ecosystem. While this can be advantageous for developers already familiar with .NET technologies, it may present a steep learning curve for those coming from different backgrounds or programming languages. In contrast, frameworks like Flutter and React Native use Dart and JavaScript, respectively, which might be more accessible and appealing to a broader range of developers. 

Finally, .NET MAUI’s performance, while improved compared to Xamarin.Forms, may not always match that of native development or other cross-platform solutions like Flutter. This could result in slightly slower app launch times or reduced responsiveness in certain scenarios, potentially impacting the user experience. 

Alternatives to .NET MAUI 

While .NET MAUI offers a natural progression for Xamarin developers, it is essential to consider alternative frameworks and assess their suitability for specific projects. If the UI will require extensive refactoring to upgrade to MAUI, an investment in native development or a cross platform framework with a larger community could make more sense. Below are some popular alternatives to .NET MAUI: 

Native Development 

Native development offers numerous advantages, including optimal performance, seamless user experience, access to all device features, enhanced security, app store optimization, tighter system integration, and access to cutting-edge platform features. A natively developed application is our primary recommendation and should be the end goal. The native engineers at Bottle Rocket have the skills needed to bring a quality mobile experience to fruition in a timely manner. 

Flutter 

Flutter is a cross-platform framework backed by Google that allows developers to write Dart code once and deploy it on multiple platforms. It offers fast development, customizable widgets, high performance, easy integration with other technologies, and a growing community. Flutter is an excellent choice for developers seeking a high-quality, efficient cross-platform framework without sacrificing performance or customizability. 

One of the key differences between Flutter and other frameworks is its rendering engine, which enables Flutter’s UI to look consistent across all platforms. It also includes the option to display platform-specific components with some additional effort. The Flutter roadmap includes rendering engine upgrades to allow for smooth animations and promising experimentation into 3D graphics. 

Overall, Flutter is a great option and our recommendation for developers who want to build high-quality cross-platform apps quickly and efficiently while maintaining a consistent user experience across different platforms. 

React Native 

React Native, backed by Facebook, enables cross-platform development using JavaScript. Like Xamarin and MAUI, it utilizes native components for a consistent platform experience but may require additional QA between platforms to ensure everything is rendering as expected. While React Native’s performance may not match native development, it still provides a good balance between development speed, cross-platform compatibility, and performance. Additionally, React Native has built-in support for integrating with other popular technologies, such as Redux and GraphQL, making it easy to add features like state management and data fetching to your app. 

React Native’s hot reloading feature allows developers to see changes in the app’s UI in real-time, making the development process faster and more efficient. It has a large and active community of developers, which means there are plenty of resources, libraries, and tools available to help with development. This is beneficial as developers are bound to run into issues around upgrades or other odd behaviors in React Native. 

Upgrading React Native apps can be more challenging compared to Flutter due to the former’s reliance on native components and the need for a JavaScript bridge, which can introduce compatibility issues when updating dependencies or platform-specific code. This may require additional QA between platforms and manual adjustments to ensure a smooth update process. On the other hand, Flutter’s use of a single rendering engine and Dart language simplifies updates by providing a consistent UI across platforms and reducing dependency on platform-specific components. As a result, Flutter offers a more streamlined and efficient update process, sometimes taking hours instead of weeks to complete, driving down the cost of maintenance for Flutter apps.  

Overall, React Native is a logical choice for React/JavaScript/TypeScript developers who want to build cross-platform apps in a language they are already familiar with.

Are you prepared?  

Developers must consider their options for upgrading or migrating to a new framework. .NET MAUI offers a natural progression for Xamarin developers, with improved performance, developer experience, and platform support. However, native development or alternatives like Flutter and React Native also provide compelling benefits for developers and the application. 

The post Is .NET MAUI the right Xamarin successor for you? appeared first on SD Times.

Impeller renderer on iOS optimizations have led to reduced latency, eliminating shader compilation issues and resulting in smoother performance. Additionally, some benchmarks show that Impeller now has improved average throughput, surpassing previous benchmarks. The average frame rasterization time in the flutter/gallery transitions performance benchmark has been halved compared to the Skia renderer.

In 3.10, Flutter announced that wide gamut colors were available under a flag when using Impeller. After hearing and addressing feedback from users, wide gamut colors are now the default on iOS when using Impeller.

Progress is being made on developing the Vulkan backend for Impeller, but it hasn’t reached a quality level suitable for an official preview, according to Flutter in a blog post that contains additional details. The goal is to ensure a high-quality initial experience with Impeller on Android, which is not yet achieved. 

Plans are to potentially launch a preview period for Impeller on Android in a stable release later this year. Despite the lack of an Android preview, optimizations benefiting both OpenGL and Vulkan backends have been implemented in Impeller’s Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) over the past year. Notably, average frame rasterization times on Android have improved significantly in the flutter/gallery transitions performance benchmark. Ongoing work is dedicated to further enhancing the Android preview’s quality.

Also, Impeller for macOS is available in preview and users can test Impeller and enable it in their app by following the guidance on the Impeller page.

Flutter added a new API to retrieve various properties of a display. The new getter FlutterView.display returns a Display object. The Display object reports the physical size, the device pixel ratio, and the refresh rate of the display.

Also, when using TextField on iOS, users will automatically see an option to use the device camera to recognize characters and insert them into the field. 

The post Flutter 3.13 released with Impeller improvements and API for foldables appeared first on SD Times.

The event was hosted live in Nairobi, Kenya, as well as available for live, online viewing here. 

The Keynote Address was delivered this morning, and started with Tim Sneath, product & UX director for Flutter & Dart. 

Sneath explained that Flutter’s mission for app developers is to ensure beauty, by offering them complete control over every pixel on the screen; speed, by allowing apps to be compiled to machine code rather than having code run through an interpreted environment; productivity, by offering technologies that allow developer to see their changes as they are working; portability, so that users can develop with flexibility; and openness through Flutter’s free and open-source nature. 

He went on to explain Flutter’s growth since its initial release back in 2017, stating that there are currency over five million Flutter developers as well as over 700,000 acts that have been launched to date.

Ander Dobo, product manager for Flutter, then took the stage and unveiled the company’s newest releases, Flutter 3.7 and Dart 2.19, an update to Dart, Flutter’s programming language. 

He explained that with these releases, enhancements have been made to Flutter’s support of Material 3, the latest version of Google’s UI/UX design system, Material Design. According to Dobo, this includes the migration of widgets like Radio Buttons, Sliders, and Badges.

These releases also offer users adaptive layouts in order to allow the UI of the users app to automatically scale to any screen size. Furthermore, menu bars and cascading context menus have been added, increasing customization capabilities. 

Dobo also explained that Impeller, the new rendering runtime for Flutter, is now available for a preview for users to use in IOS versions of their applications.

“We have also made several updates to dev tools,” Dobo continued. “The suite of performance and debugging tools for both Flutter and Dart, including a complete redesign of the memory debugging tool, and we have added new features to analyze the memory features of your app.”

He went on to explain that Firebase, another one of Google’s app development platforms, can also be used within Flutter applications in order to heighten the personalization capabilities offered. 

According to Dobo, Firebase can be used in conjunction with Flutter to tailor names, avatars, and more to the specific user, eliminating the need for the developer to write an authorization. 

Next, Alex Greaves, co-founder and CTO of the online platform that helps users build and deploy Flutter apps FlutterFlow, and Abel Mengistu, co-founder and CEO of FlutterFlow, took the stage to walk viewers through the platform and its features.

Greaves explained that, with FlutterFlow, clean Flutter code that is available for users to view or export is produced as changes are made. Additionally, Mengistu stated that there are over 200 million lines of code that have been exported to GitHub directly from FlutterFlow.

They also mentioned that all of the premium features offered with FlutterFlow are free of charge for both students and educators.

Sneath then gave the audience a rundown of what they can look forward to for the future of Flutter, discussing several features that are still works in progress.

According to Sneath, the features users can anticipate fall into four main categories: breakthrough graphics and performance, seamless integration for web and mobile, early to new and emerging architectures, and continued focus on developer experience.

Among these upcoming features is Dart 3 Alpha, the first preview of Dart’s next major release. With this, users gain access to new language features, the completion of Dart’s journey towards sound null safety, and the expansion of platform support. 

In addition, new features can be expected for Flutter Web, including CanvasKit reductions, font size reductions, deferred loading, and improved concurrency.

Flutter users can also expect new features in Flutter Mobile, such as News Toolkit, the first version of which is now generally available. With this, users gain access to best practices from Google’s news initiative. 

The next version of Wondrous, a reference app that shows how to design and develop beautiful, tailored UI with Flutter, was also announced during this morning’s Keynote. This release is intended to provide users with a positive experience regardless of their screen size. 

It was also unveiled that the team at Flutter is working on eliminating method channels for calling APIs as they hope to enable users with the technology needed to call APIs directly from Dart.

Lastly for Flutter Mobile, 3D capabilities can be expected in the future. This includes the ability to change the appearance of those 3D images, animate them, and multiply them with Impeller. 

To watch the Keynote, as well as other sessions on demand, visit the website.

The post Google announces Flutter 3.7 and Dart 2.19 as well as upcoming features at Flutter Forward appeared first on SD Times.

Any growing company has the same challenge: hiring high-caliber people who will contribute to your growth. Our team of 50 people and counting works remotely and globally. But we’ve got innovative practices in place that bring us together seamlessly as a unified team, and we apply the same approach across the board – no matter what industry we’re working with.  

Three pillars of a great hire

Let’s say your goals include rolling out a great process, bringing great ideas to the table, showing your clients you know what you’re doing so they have confidence that you will meet their needs, and, of course, creating great products. Those aren’t unusual goals. But to execute, you need great people. Any lapses within your team will detract from your ability to deliver. Knowing that, I look for three essential characteristics in our hires: technical skills, great communication, and reliability.

1) A technical foundation – and willingness to evolve

Realistically, technology is constantly changing. So, while technical skills are important, they may not always be most important. The technology we’ll be using in five years might not even exist yet. I find that people can certainly gain skills with solid coaching, mentorship, and practice. That said, I need them to have a solid foundation as well as appetite for learning if that collaboration is going to succeed. 

A strong technical foundation gives a developer the confidence to experiment and push the limits but in a disciplined, intelligent way. It also makes it easy to partner and work with outside teams – something we do a lot – and work to create the solution they need. Working with Flutter, for instance, requires a broad range of expertise – specifically, fluency in programming languages and comfort in multiple platforms, such as Android and iOS. Programming isn’t a siloed endeavor today. You need to be able to work with whatever you need, even if you’re not 100 percent familiar with it. 

On a deeper level, and especially with experienced developers, I look for people whose programming shows a kind of empathy. I don’t mean stirring up emotions. But there’s a way to write code that makes it easy to work with: it follows a pattern that can be applied by someone else down the line. Our engineers appreciate that their programming will go through different hands, so they write elegant code that can be changed fast and effectively. A big part of our culture is sharing and honoring that mindset.    

2) Communication  

Hiring only for technical skills isn’t enough. Whatever the project, the outcome depends on good communication. Your engineers need to be able to convince both your teams and clients that the solution you’re offering is the right one. Again, one’s organizational culture will help or hinder this openness.

Culture can only go so far, however. Being remote and global requires strong communication skills. It’s not about having perfect English – I’m from Spain and work with engineers from everywhere. Whether in Chicago or Rotterdam or Madrid, the best developers can make themselves understood respectfully and honestly and therefore productively. 

3) Reliability

Finally, for clients to depend on your company, you need to be able to rely on your people. One of the biggest services a strong consultancy offers is much more important than any app: trustworthiness. Instilling confidence requires total reliability: being on time, accountable, proactive, and ready at every phase of a project. That’s an important differentiator some otherwise great companies may miss when it comes to how they deliver. You’re only as reliable as your people are. Consistency – a simple value – is a huge part of it.

How to build a culture of growth

My advice to expanding companies looking for great talent is to stay open, and welcome participation and interaction. You might just find your next developers that way.

We see a lot of external engagement due to the open source nature of our work. People send us their resumes and news on their projects that apply our methods because they want to be more involved with what we’re doing. We just had an engineer join the team who came from a former client. I also keep an eye on the people in the open source world making contributions to our public tools.

Support your people with education and training so they can grow within your company. I came across a jarring statistic recently: only 15 percent of U.S. employees would not leave their current job for any reason. It’s not enough to attract great people. Give them a reason to stay. Work to build a culture that nurtures your people over the long term.  

At VGV, we hold our software to extremely high standards and test rigorously. Above all, we celebrate teamwork and intellectual capital. That’s partly due to our industry, which embraces exchange and collaboration. We see ourselves as ambassadors of that ethic; it is our fundamental philosophy. You can’t dedicate yourself to creating robust solutions that scale and last if you don’t also want your company to last and make a difference. 

Technical skills, communication, and reliability are the best predictors of a culture where great development teams carry an organization’s vision forward into the future.

Jorge Coca is Head of Engineering at Very Good Ventures.

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With Flutter 3, users are enabled to build experiences for six platforms from a single codebase, offering developers heightened productivity and enabling startups to bring new ideas to the full addressable market from the start.

Additionally, this release offers added support for macOS and Linux apps, bringing users new input and interaction models, compilation and build support, accessibility and internalization, and platform-specific integration. 

According to the company, the goal of this is to provide customers with the flexibility to take advantage of the underlying operating system while sharing as much UI and logic as they choose. 

Flutter has invested in supporting both Intel and Apple Silicon on macOS, with Universal Binary support that allows apps to package executables that run natively on both architectures. 

On Linux, Canonical and Google have worked in collaboration with each other to bring users a highly-integrated, best-of-breed option for development.

With improved performance, Material You support, and productivity updates, Flutter 3 also works to enhance many of the fundamentals.

This version is also fully native on Apple Silicon for development, allowing users to take full advantage of Dart’s support for Apple Silicon.  

Flutter’s work for Material Design 3 is also mostly completed with this release. This enables developers to take advantage of an adaptable, cross-platform design system that offers dynamic color schemes as well as updates visual components.

To learn more about Flutter 3, visit the website. 

The post Flutter 3 released with multiplatform capabilities appeared first on SD Times.

MediaQuery now has Display Features, which are parts of the display that can be obstructed by hardware features, such as the hinge on the Surface Duo. 

When users switch over to the master channel on their local Flutter setup, they can now access a property called ‘displayFeatures’. 

When users want to display content on only one screen of Surface Duo, which is the case when they’re showing a dialog, they now have the option of using the ‘DisplayFeatureSubScreen’ widget. The widget is mostly needed for modal routes and is used in the “Dialogs and popups support” PR. 

“Some of our contributions have not yet been merged. If you want to give them a try today, this is now far easier to do compared to when we first proposed these changes. Back then you had to configure a custom Flutter Engine. Things are a lot simpler now,” Andrei Diaconu, senior software engineer of Surface Duo Experience wrote in a blog post. 

Microsoft also added a number of new samples for foldable Flutter that showcase design patterns for foldable devices. 

In addition, the Flutter team has recently released Flutter 2.10 in which the most important announcement is that Windows support has reached production quality. 

The post Microsoft contributes features to Flutter for foldable devices appeared first on SD Times.

With this, Flutter has been tailored specifically for Windows applications, combining a Dart framework and C++ engine. Additionally, the Flutter engine is hosted on an embedded layer that allows for communication between Windows and Flutter. 

Flutter coordinates with Windows to deal with things such as window resizing and DPI changes, as well as working with inputs such as keyboard and mouse, in addition to touch screen capabilities already built in.

For more details, read more.

Python in VS Code February 2022 release 

Microsoft revealed that the Python Extension for Visual Studio Code includes several new features, including: 

• Smart selection
• Folding support
• Improvements to the Python interpreters list
• Improvements when using Anaconda

With Smart selection via Pylance, selecting Python Code using the keyboard requires fewer key presses. This comes as a highly requested update, defining the users’ selection range by considering their own code structure and heuristics. 

Developers are also enabled to expand their code selection with Shift+Alt+Right Arrow and shrink it with Shift+Alt+Left Arrow. See here for more information. 

Apache weekly update

For the week ending on February 4, 2022, 303 Apache Committers altered 9,625,849 lines of code over 3,255 commits. The top five contributors of the week are Jean-Baptiste Onofré, Claus Ibsen, Sebastian Bazley, Guillaume Nodet, and Eric Milles.

There have also been several project updates, including the retirement of Apache Ambari and Apache Usergrid. This decision came from Apache committers and was due to general inactivity. 

In addition, users of Apache Superset up to and including 1.3.2 should upgrade to version 1.4.0 or higher as a password leak has been detected for authenticated users. This leak was found and reported by Cesar Santos. 

The post SD Times news digest: Support for Flutter on Windows now available; Python in VS Code February 2022 release; Apache weekly update appeared first on SD Times.

The framework is a customizable pipeline that simplifies the implementation of prediction projects. Users only need to have the input data source, the logic to extract and process the data, and a Vertex AutoML model readily available along with the right feature list, and the Prediction Framework will be in charge of creating and deploying the required artifacts.

The framework was built to be hosted in the Google Cloud Platform and it utilizes all of the Cloud Functions in order to complete data processing. To start using the Prediction Framework, a configuration file must be prepared with a few environment variables. 

Flutter releases MIX

Flutter, the open-source UI software developer kit created by Google, recently announced MIX, a new tool for building design systems. The tool helps users build design systems expressively and easily by offering building blocks that help developers and designers create aesthetically pleasing and consistent user interfaces for their applications. 

MIX acts as a helper for easily maintaining a design language by utilizing the composition style of Flutter along with the advantage of inheritance for all attributes. To experience and get a feel for MIX, users should create a new Flutter project and integrate MIX with it. 

For more information on this release, visit here. 

Apache news roundup 

For the week ending on December 24, 2021, 317 Apache Committers changed 9,133,089 lines of code over 3,258 commits. The top 5 contributors are Gary Gregory, Harikrishna Patnala, Claus Ibsen, Duo Zhang, and Andi Huber. 

Additionally, Apache released Apache NiFi 1.15.2, Apache HBase 3.0.0-alpha-2, Apache Parquet 1.11.2 and 1.12.12, Apache Archiva 2.2.7, Apache JSPwiki 2.11.1, Apache Traffic Control 6.0.2, Apache Jackrabbit FileVault 3.5.8, Apache Tika 1.28 and 2.2.1, Apache Geode 1.12.7, 1.13.6, and 1.14.2, Apache Ignite 2.11.1, Apache PLC4X 0.9.1, Apache OFBitz 18.12.04, and several others.

For a full list of these releases, visit here.

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“Flutter allows you to handcraft beautiful experiences where your brand and design comes to the forefront. Flutter is fast, compiling your source to machine code, but thanks to our support for stateful hot reload, you still get the productivity of interpreted environments, allowing you to make changes while your app is running and see the results immediately. And Flutter is open, with thousands of contributors adding to the core framework and extending it with an ecosystem of packages,” the Flutter team wrote in a post.

The team explained that the latest release transforms Flutter from a mobile framework to a portable framework, allowing developers to target new platforms.  

The latest release also features production-quality support for the web, targeting progressive web apps (PWAs), single page apps (SPAs), and the mobile web. “The early foundation of the web was document-centric. But the web platform has evolved to encompass richer platform APIs that enable highly sophisticated apps with hardware-accelerated 2D and 3D graphics and flexible layout and paint APIs. Flutter’s web support builds on these innovations, offering an app-centric framework that takes full advantage of all that the modern web has to offer,” the  team wrote. Other features for the web include test autofill, control over address bar URLs and routing, PWA manifests, interactive scrollbars, keyboard shortcuts, and screen reader support for better accessibility. 

The team also announced a number of Flutter partnerships including Canonical that will bring Flutter to the desktop; Microsoft to expand Flutter’s support and foldable device capabilities; and Toyota to bring Flutter to vehicles.

Other features include the beta release of Google MobileAds for Flutter and Flutter plug-ins for core Firebase services (Authentication, Cloud Firestore, Cloud Functions, Cloud Messaging, Cloud Storage and Crashlytics).

More information is available here.

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AWS Amplify provides a set of tools for building scalable web applications, while Flutter is Google’s UI toolkit for mobile, web, and desktop application development. 

Key benefits for AWS customers include an interface for authenticating users, an interface for managing user content in storage buckets, and analytics, according to the company. 

The beta release for Amplify Flutter was launched in August 2020, and between then and now three new capabilities have been added to the solution. It added new GraphQL API and REST APIs and handlers. It also introduced Amplify DataStore as a programming model for leveraging shared and distributed data. The third new feature is Hosted UI, which can be used to implement authentication and is compatible with Amazon Cognito and other social identity providers like Facebook, Google, and Amazon. 

Amplify Flutter is now available in all regions that support AWS Amplify, and there is no additional cost for using it, Amazon explained.

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