Designing for GenUI: What Changes When AI Builds the UI?

Earlier this year, the Flutter team released GenUI: an SDK that enables AI to compose UIs based on your design system at runtime.

To help Google present it at Google I/O and Google Cloud Next, gskinner was challenged to conceptualize, design, and build Hatcha: an open-source event-planning app for iOS, Android and the web, where a host plans an event through a conversational interview with AI, and GenUI generates dynamic, themed, and interactive invites. As guests respond, the planning experience dynamically composes itself around the specific context gathered for that particular event.

It’s not a form you fill out and forget — it’s a dynamic, evolving experience that GenUI actively constructs around the people involved.

Continue reading →

Introducing Hatcha — A GenUI Vignette Built in Flutter

After a handful of months of hard work, we’re excited to announce our latest collaboration with Google and the Flutter team: it’s a cross-platform GenUI demo called Hatcha!

What is it?

GenUI is an experimental SDK from Google that gives AI control to compose UIs at runtime based on context.

Continue reading →

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!

Continue reading →

Pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with FlutterFlow

The gskinner team is well known in the Flutter community for combining innovative design with creative coding to build robust, beautiful applications. Over the past 20 years, our experienced designers and developers have consistently been challenged by our clients to push the boundaries of their platforms — from high-performance fintech dashboards to the best social casino experience we shipped for a major entertainment client, whose real-time multiplayer requirements forced us to rethink how Flutter handles state at scale. When FlutterFlow came to us to apply this experience to their platform, we were intrigued by the potential to empower our designers and narrow the gap between the design and production phase. Starting fresh, we embarked on this journey and were surprised by what we learned along the way.

Continue reading →

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!

Continue reading →