How user research shaped the Flutter Casual Game Toolkit — Introduction During this week’s Google I/O, we unveiled the Flutter Casual Game Toolkit, a set of resources to support game builders in the Flutter community. Up until that point, Flutter hadn’t focused on game development as an officially supported use case, though we had been impressed by success stories such as…

Why utility and usability are not enough — What’s the last time a productivity tool made you smile or even feel proud? What a bizarre question. After all, shouldn’t we judge productivity tools, such as word processors, spreadsheets, and code editors, by how much they help their users get things done? …

What if you can work 10 times hard and get paid 10 times more? — In my last post, I shared a few interesting ideas about programming from Paul Graham’s book Hackers & Painters. Another theme of the book is startups. In Chapter 6 of the book titled How to Make Wealth, Graham makes a strong case for building startups instead of working for existing…

Ideas from Paul Graham’s book Hackers & Painters — Paul Graham’s book Hackers & Painters is one of the most interesting and opinionated books I read in 2021. If Paul Graham is not a name familiar to you, here is how Wikipedia describes him: “He is best known for his work on the programming language Lisp, his former startup…

Latest user Interface technologies for programming support — I attended the 34th ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST 2021), the premier forum for innovations in human-computer interfaces, in the week of October 11th, 2021. It was a fully virtual conference due to COVID. …

Does your app use emojis or support multiple languages? Dart just introduced a new way to safely handle them in string manipulation. — Like many other programming languages designed before emojis started to dominate our daily communications and the rise of multilingual support in commercial apps, Dart represents a string as a sequence of UTF-16 code units. …

I got my first computer at the age of 12. It ran Windows 95. Later, I learned that Microsoft had another version of Windows called Windows… — I got my first computer at the age of 12. It ran Windows 95. Later, I learned that Microsoft had another version of Windows called Windows NT for professionals. …

Can visual design be applied to error messages? We found that it drastically improves the usability of error messages in Flutter. — When you write computer programs, it’s inevitable that errors are introduced, even for the most experienced developer. To resolve an error, the first step is often reading the error message that’s displayed in the console. …

Explained through a user study of Flutter — Explained through a user study of Flutter When people talk about User Experience (UX), they often talk about their beloved consumer products: a smartphone, a messaging app, or perhaps a pair of headphones. User Experience also matters when you build something for developers. People tend to forget that developers are…