Real features for real-life programmers.
- Flutter, through Dart, offers unique capabilities, as well as through pub.dev, which is why I wanted to make some truly necessary requests.
I’m not a formally trained professor, but in my country, Argentina, due to all its political and social issues, I teach courses on programming, robotics, electronics, industrial processes, electricity, control and power, automation, IoT, and AI. These courses are focused on solving real-life problems, aiming to provide young people with new knowledge and tools to better navigate their future, from the most basic and simple concepts to complex topics like Data-Driven Management Systems and RAGs (without any non-profit or political party affiliations).
One of the major issues in teaching in my country is access to equipment with adequate power (RAM, processor, storage) to run Android Studio, Visual Studio, and other IDEs, as well as virtual machines, Docker, Kubernetes, etc.
That’s why we always (and because we don’t have another choice) use online services, and it’s very difficult to find a platform that offers everything necessary for comprehensive and holistic teaching. We are constantly jumping from one platform to another because one offers this and another offers that.
- Literally, many times there’s only one or two computers for 30 students. Some time ago (when Nowa first started), I used to do the UI and export it to finish some things on my PC.
But it’s always cumbersome and problematic to have to resort to multiple languages to accomplish just one task (Dart, C#, JS, Java), as well as needing a computer that can handle all of this and have enough computing power and storage to avoid crashes in the middle of a compilation.
That’s why if there were a possibility of supporting USB Serial, Scanner via ML Kit [Online and Offline], since other libraries have limitations in terms of scanning formats or are paid or vendor-locked, as well as using proprietary libraries (I created a library to handle hypercomplex algebras; Quaternions, Octonions, and their duals [for trajectory and movement computations in robotics]), and obviously (the most difficult part) support in the Build Gradle, as there are libraries (Open Street Maps, ML Kit, etc.) that have special settings.
But for that, it is also necessary to be able to download the APK and test it on different devices: phones, tablets, HMIs, etc.
If that were possible, I’d be willing to sell my soul to the green devil and secure funding from local drug dealers (including politicians, police officers, lawyers, and judges).
Because honestly, something that could be done in a couple of hours takes days when you have to jump from platform to platform.