Author / shawn.blais

shawn.blais

Shawn has worked as programmer and product designer for over 20 years, shipping several games on Steam and Playstation and dozens of apps on mobile. He has extensive programming experience with Dart, C#, ActionScript, SQL, PHP and Javascript and a deep proficiency with motion graphics and UX design. Shawn is currently the Technical Director for gskinner.

@tree_fortress

by shawn.blais

FlutterFlow Vignettes Technical Dive, Part 2

In this post, we’re going to continue to dive into the FlutterFlow Vignettes we created for the FlutterFlow team last year. Previously, we looked at the Social Media Generator, which demonstrated how to build custom “Slider” controls using Gesture Detector and interacting with multi-modal AI.

Today, we’ll dive into the Smart Home Hub demo, which showcases several interesting concepts:

  • Multi-function light tile components: Tiles that act as buttons to toggle devices on/off while also allowing inline slider adjustments using the DragUpdate gesture.
  • A reusable device template card that can embed custom controls with the Widget Builder parameter.
  • A Radial Thermostat component built entirely with FlutterFlow Builder widgets and advanced layout logic.

Let’s jump in!

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by shawn.blais

Flutter: iOS Home Widgets Deep Dive

Last year the Flutter Team released an excellent codelab that explained the process of adding an iOS or Android “Home Widget” to your Flutter app. As it turns out, it’s surprisingly easy!

Adding Widgets is a fairly happy path as they can be added using the built-in UI flows in XCode or Android Studio. The development can also be done in the respective IDEs, complete with robust code-hinting, debug and hot(ish) reload support!

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by shawn.blais

Flutter Vignettes updated to Dart 3.x

We’re happy to announce that the Flutter Vignettes have been updated to Dart 3.x and Flutter 3.19! This will allow developers to more easily build the Vignettes and port the relevant source code to their own projects.

If you’ve forgotten what the Vignettes are (or never knew about them in the first place!) you can check out our micro-site or view the video below as a refresher. In short: they are a collection of micro-experiments that attempt to push the boundaries of what is visually possible in Flutter. Their purpose is to inspire designers and developers to push their Flutter apps to the next level.

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by shawn.blais

Flutter: Crafting a great experience for screen readers

While building the Wonderous app, we wanted to craft a great experience for visually impaired users using screen readers. Flutter does an admirable job working with these systems out of the box, but app developers also have work to do to create a polished user experience.

In this post we’ll look at how screen readers work and then run through the top accessibility related lessons we learned along the way.

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