So, I’m writing another mobile app. This one is a chore list for our household. And, since our household is not technologically homogenous, I’m writing it in Flutter so I can deploy it to All The Devices. Flutter’s idiom is lambda-heavy, and most of the tutorials and examples wind up embedding application logic in the UI, which I find hard to follow at times and which, as a practice, makes me itch and feel like I need a shower.
A helpful soul on StackOverflow pointed me at an example project that demonstrates how to build a functioning task list app using a variety of different frameworks. I decided to go with flutter_redux, which is pretty cool once I managed to understand how it works. You just treat your application as a giant state machine, you store all the state in a single state class, and everything that happens is an event/action that gets sent through a set of functions that you write and attach to the framework. All of which is ridiculously complicated, yet elegant at the same time. I wind up writing reams of code just to get the first screen to display. The marginal cost for additional screens, though, is tiny, and logic is nicely decoupled from presentation. It seems very FizzBuzzEnterprise, though, honestly.
Todoist?
Man, I just don’t like redux. It feels too much like a foundation tool – which is fine – I just want more baked in functionality on top of it. mobx always seemed nicer to me, though I have not actually *used* it in anything.
There are a gazillion chore apps out there, and of course we’ve tried them. For one reason or another their affordances weren’t solving our specific problems so why not write our own? Looking at mobx, I see what you mean.