How Flutter Will Win The Desktop
Did, you know 22 years ago, Visual Basic 6 was released? I know, you probably feel really old right now. But it was released at a different time, a time when RAD (Rapid Application Development) was all the rage.
20 years later, and software development and design has changed considerably. But somehow, the company that gave us the OS (Windows), has given us the weakest tooling to make apps for its own OS. How did we get here?
To understand this, we need to go on a journey through the history of making apps for Windows computers. It’s a bit of a detour but I’m making a point, I promise.
It all started with Win Forms
When everyone (thankfully) moved on from Visual Basic 6, the next thing we had was WinForms. WinForms was great in that it maintained a lot of the drag’n’drop design that made making apps a breeze. But, your produced app would be pretty bland. Sure, there were custom controls and other things you could do to spruce up your app, but out of the box, it was the standard look and feel.
WinForms apps also struggled with a very strong coupling between the business logic and the UI (User…