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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We’re really excited to introduce a new package called Flutter Custom Carousel, a widget for creating fully custom, animated scrollable lists. It manages all of the tricky logic surrounding scroll interactions and physics, and leaves the visual presentation of items up to you.
The idea came from discussions about building a carousel widget; we were looking at the wide diversity of carousel UIs, debating which one to create, and what parameters were needed to customize it. There were too many possibilities, each with a vast range of potential customizations, and it became obvious we either had to pick a single option and try to perfect it, or take a more radical approach that empowered developers to do “anything”.
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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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Ever wish there was an easy way to add rich animation to your Flutter UIs? I did, so when we started working on the Wonderous app, it seemed like the perfect excuse to build a best of breed open-source animation package.
For some reason, starting a new project always brings a small feeling of inherent joy and excitement. There is something about a clean slate that is just very comforting, the lack of constraints, the promise of the unknown!
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v4.0 of the “XD to Flutter” plugin is available now, with a focus on simplifying and improving the Dart code it generates.
Building on v3’s focus on improving the developer experience, v4 includes a fairly significant refactor of how layout code is generated by the plugin to enable smarter, cleaner results.
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When it comes to implementing a url-based Router (aka Nav2) there are really 2 high-level components to the API:
The interesting thing here, is that the controller portion, is a fairly stable, boring API. Reading or writing the url location, or accessing queryParams is all pretty straight-forward. Really all you are doing here is setting a string value, and parsing query params using the URI class.
There are so many great libraries on pub.dev these days it can be hard to sift through them all. The flutter team maintains their own list of favorites, and we thought it might be worthwhile to put together a list of our own favorite libs!
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