One of the trickier things to do in Flutter is to get the size of things.
Generally there are 3 use cases you might have:
The first 2 are quite simple so we’ll just skim them. The 3rd is more interesting.
Continue reading →Earlier this year Google and Ubuntu approached us with an open brief, to try and create a full-scale desktop application for Linux, macOS, Web, and Windows. The result was Flokk, which we released (and open-sourced) back in July.
In this post, we’re going to dive into some of the challenges we faced, the discoveries we made, and desktop-specific features that we added.
Continue reading →There are many ways to architect an app in Flutter, and just about as many state management frameworks out there to do it for you! With this in mind, we thought it might be nice to talk about how we build scale-able apps without a framework, using only the Provider package, and some simple application tiers.
Continue reading →Occasionally in Flutter, you will need to get the size and/or position of a widget. Some common use cases for this are:
Recently we’ve been exploring the ability to extend the base State<T> class, to add additional capabilities to our views, or writing our own custom Mixins to do the same.
Most Developers are familiar with using the various framework Mixins, like TickerProviderStateMixin but what is not commonly known, is how easy it is to create your own flavors of these. Additionally, many developers extend State<T> constantly, and write very repetitive boilerplate code, without realizing how easy it is to create their own BaseState<T> instead.
In this example, we’ll make a “base state” that provides 3 AnimatorControllers to any widget that needs to animate something. We could then apply this to any Widget in our application, and it automatically get 3 animators to play with. No setup, or teardown required.
Continue reading →After several months of hard work, we’re excited to announce our latest collaboration with Google, Canonical, and the Flutter Team, it’s a cross-platform app called Flokk!
As we begin pushing Flutter to more platforms such as Desktop and Web, it is becoming increasingly important to quickly and easily measure performance of your application. While the built-in performance monitor gets the job done, it leaves a lot to be desired in terms of readability and flexibility.
As the old school Flash devs we are, we remember the days when virtually every Flash application around would use the hi-res-stats package by mrdoob (yes, that mrdoob). It was extremely helpful to catch performance issues, and make sure your application was smooth (which in those days, was a solid 24fps!).
Currently nothing like that exists in the Flutter community. To help fill this gap, we’ve created StatsFl! Available now on pub.dev: https://pub.dev/packages/statsfl
Continue reading →There is a lot to like about Flutter, but one area I’m sure no one loves, is taming the Material Theme system! With over 65(!) properties, some of which, like TextTheme, break out into 10 more sub-properties is enough to make you go crazy pretty quick.
Last week we looked at how you can easily implement TextStyling, and this week we’re going to dive into Color Themes. We’ll take a look at a technique that we use to implement custom app-specific themes, while still providing Material ThemeData to the core Flutter components.
Continue reading →