Recently we took a deep dive into the new skeleton template included in the Flutter SDK. As noted in the article, one of the big missing pieces in the template is a scalable state management solution with dependency injection and data-binding.
Given that, we thought it would be informative to convert it to use a couple of popular state management libraries, specifically riverpod and GetItMixin.
Recently we compared and contrasted some common state management packages. And while app architecture was not the focus of the article, we received some feedback that the examples were too simple to give a good picture of how the approaches would scale. In this post we’ll attempt to address that concern by building a simple yet scalable skeleton app using GetIt and GetItMixin!
If you’re not familiar with GetIt, it is a robust implementation of the classic service locator pattern, which allows you to register objects by their type and then look them up from anywhere in the app. Recently it gained a sibling package named GetItMixin which provides reactive widget binding hooks. Combined these two packages make up one of the simplest and cleanest methods of managing state within a Flutter application. Let’s take a look!
NOTE: To follow along, the full demo is posted here:
https://github.com/esDotDev/flutter_experiments/tree/master/get_it_skeleton_app
Today we’re going to look at 3 of the more popular libraries for basic state management in Flutter: GetIt, Provider and riverpod.
For each of the libraries, we’ll look at how you can perform data-binding, data-injection, and how you might mock them for testing. To follow along with the examples below, check out the code on github.
Continue reading →For many years Flutter has provided the basic “Counter App” each time you created a new project. While that example provides a nice introduction to the foundational concepts of StatefulWidget and basic font/asset management, it does not really resemble the structure of a “complete app”. This has left developers without guidance for anything beyond a basic single page app.
One thing that has always felt a little limiting in Flutter for us has been its inability to perform hit-testing for a button or gesture detector that is outside the parents bounds. This has been a popular issue in the Flutter bug-base over the years, getting something around 150+ upvotes if you add up all incarnations of the issue.
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In a previous post we looked at a method for binding directly to the keyboard. While this is handy for quick spikes, or truly global listeners, it is a little dangerous as it is easy to forget to remove these listeners. In this post we’ll look at a couple of different ways to do this a little more safely.
Continue reading →I’m very excited to announce the release of v3.0 of the “XD to Flutter” plugin, with a number of powerful new developer features.
Prior to v1.0, the primary goal was just to output as much of the content in Adobe XD to Flutter as possible: Vector graphics, text, images, fills, blurs, blend modes, etc. Version 1 tackled responsive layout, and v2.0 built on that with support for stacks, scroll groups, and padding. Version 2 also included the ability to export null-safe code, a critical developer feature for working with Flutter 2.
In v3.0 we’ve doubled down on improving the workflow for developers, including providing new ways to clean up the exported code and integrate dynamic content.
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When building a custom UI control in Flutter it’s tempting to just use a GestureDetector and call it a day, but to do so would be a mistake! Especially if you’re planning on supporting users with alternate inputs like mouse or keyboard.
