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 →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!
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.
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After sharing our simplified screen size detection example to reddit last week, we received a great suggestion from the community: the concept would work better as a set of extension methods.
The original thought was to add the methods to MediaQuery, which didn’t seem that appealing because it would still be quite verbose to access. Then we realized we could just use the build context directly, which turned out really nice! So nice, that we’ve gone ahead and created a package for it here: https://pub.dev/packages/sized_context.
Continue reading →One of the big issues with Flutter for Web right now is it’s lack of support for dart.io. This means things like a simple Platform.isAndroid call will cause your web builds to crash on startup. In fact, just including the dart.io package _at all_ will break your app completely.
In cases like this, what is needed is some form of conditional compilation, so we can include the code on some platforms, and exclude it on others.
Some platforms like Unity, have built in platform defines, which let you easily partition sections of code for specific platforms. Unfortunately, this is not so easy to do with Flutter, but it is possible!
Continue reading →One of the great things about Flutter, is how you can use composition to combine multiple built-in Widgets, creating unique UI’s very quickly and easily.
Today, we’re going to create a FlippableBox, which is a double-sided card, that holds two pieces of content and automatically re-sizes to match its content, whenever it’s flipped over.
It will end up looking something like this:
Flutter is a mobile UI toolkit that combines fast development, expressive and beautiful UIs, with native performance. To test-drive the platform, Grant Skinner & Mike Chambers recently built Redrix: a mobile companion app for Destiny 2.
