Is having the UI layout and styling mixed in with the code considered a feature of Flutter, or is providing a way to specify them separately in a machine-readable or declaritive format just not done yet?

I'm a fuddy-duddy still doing UI in GTK and Qt, I haven't kept up in trends in web and mobile design, but I know that when our developers do the layout and design it comes out awful and unusable, but luckily with GTK and Qt we can just hand it off to our designer after the basic functionality is in place and he can do some layout tweaking with Glade or Qt Designer, and is comfortable with working with CSS to provide us with custom widget styling and images, and then he sends it back to us and we clean up the results and merge it.

All of the Flutter examples seem to have the UI written entirely in code, both layout and styling, and I don't think he'd be comfortable with that. You may note that we send it to him, he tweaks it, and sends it back to us to merge; we've never been able to teach him Git, but that's OK, because we don't expect him to teach us Photoshop and design.

So, I'm just wondering if Flutter is intended to always be like this, with the whole UI specified in executable code that needs to be compiled and run for each iteration, or if it is intended to add a way to separate out the design parts (layout and styling) in a way that they can be worked on at least somewhat independently of the code?

I know that there is IDE support for hot reload, which may be OK for a designer to work with, but I'm always a little skeptical of that since most developers I know use VIM or Emacs and not IDEs, so sometimes IDE tooling setup can break, and once a project gets complicated, the toolchain setup for running from within an IDE can get hard to install. The nice thing about Glade or Qt Designer is that they can work with purely declarative formats so that you don't need to worry about having to have your designer get the full toolchain installed.

Flutter is about simplicity so I doubt they are planning any designer tools.

And IMO, designers should stick to their favorite tool, and leave implementation details to programmers. Hot reload makes it easy (and IDE is not required for that).

> And IMO, designers should stick to their favorite tool, and leave implementation details to programmers.

I'm curious about how this would work if the designers have to use developer tools to do the final spit-and-polish.

I don't know about how other places do it, but what I'm familiar with is that a UI mockup is sketched out and requirements given to the developer, the developer implements something but in the process finds issues with the design as specified and iterates a bit while doing so, and eventually you have something that is functional but somewhat ugly because the original sketch was not specific enough or didn't anticipate some issues that came up or the like, and then finally you give it back to the designer to do the spit-and-polish.

In some cases, the spit-and-polish can be a lot of work, because you've used some new widgets that you don't already have standard styles and graphics for, or maybe it's your first app with a new toolkit and so you need to figure out how to get your branding and style to work with it.

For designers I've worked with, CSS is their favorite tool for styling, and they prefer UI tools for spit-and-polish layout tweaks. Are you saying that they should just deal with having to learn how to do all of that embedded in code, or that they should just hand off their assets and suggestions to the developers and the developers have to do the final spit-and-polish work?

> (Disclaimer: I work on the Flutter team.)

Please, that's a disclosure, not a disclaimer.

Keep up the great work, I'm really excited by Flutter!

Honestly, the best way to see the advantages of the toolset is to complete the "Get started" section of flutter.io.

I develop iOS, Android, Web and Mac apps, and I was honestly blown away by the quality of the intelliJ and VSCode plugins available for Flutter. In fact, they've kinda ruined me for other language SDKs now.

Granted, the lack of material, demos and discussions makes it difficult to tackle some problems, but that seems to be changing these days. It's hard NOT to enjoy coding in Flutter, though, and I think that end up being its biggest strength.

Well, Flutter has been at beta 1 for just over a week now. https://medium.com/flutter-io/announcing-flutter-beta-1-buil...

I can imagine they haven't had the time to flesh out docs yet.

I think Newsvoice (https://newsvoice.com/app) is written in flutter.