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 create an experience rich in visuals and animation, but that maintained smooth performance and didn’t drain users’ batteries.
We learned a lot about rendering optimization, and wanted to share our top 5 tips to help you make your Flutter app run better.
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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.
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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Alpha video in HTML5 should be easy right? Not quite, certainly not as easy as Flash was. In an article a long long time ago, from an internet far far away … I wrote about alpha video in Flash 8. (remember Flash?). Back then alpha video was a huge new feature that allowed developers to create a .flv with a transparent background that worked in all browsers. Allowing us to do all sorts of fancy effects. With Flash being a thing of the past, modern browsers are not in agreement on what video format we should use on the web. It makes things a little more muddled today.
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.
Continue reading →It’s my opinion that you should always write tests for your source code. Tests force you to code better. Tests allow you to write dependable code, create better architecture, and help you live longer*. They also help you spot fussy APIs, opportunities for reuse, and redundancies.
That said. You don’t always have the time (or budget) to test everything to death! Not everyone sees the value in all those little green checkmarks. Life isn’t pedantic and heavy-handed. Life is a pack wild horses and sometimes you need to be the cowboy.
So, when do you push back? When do you say NO! We must write tests!
There is no reason to skip out on writing tests if you have the time to write them. Why would you opt out of better code? Taking the extra time to make your code testable will turn average code into dependable code. Code that you know actually works is almost always better than new code.
You cannot make a data structure without writing tests for it. Why would anyone trust a data structure that cannot prove it works?
Data structures must be tested. I don’t even know how you’d code a data structure without setting up a test harness first. You don’t know how your code will be used, so knowing that every little piece works as expected is necessary.
With tests, you’ll see the logic in breaking code into small pieces. Tests will make it easier to spot problems in your architecture.
Writing data structures against a test suite is the only way to do it right.
Tests are the backbone of any open source project. They make sure that community contributions do not break the codebase. This allows fixes, changes, and optimizations to be made with certainty.
Your test suite becomes the hurdle that any contributor must clear. It’s not too much to ask for contributions that prove they work.
Starting with a test suite is a great way to design an API.
This allows you to work backward from your code interface instead of coding to it. This will let you design an API from the user’s perspective first.
Point blank. If other code needs to use this code, you must write a test for it.
The testable code will become part of an ever-expanding toolbox. Dependable toy soldiers who can be summoned to fight for you. Go! Test the world!
Here are a few resources to help you start writing tests for your code.
Mocha
Node.JS Assert
Writing good tests
*There is no scientific data that shows writing tests will help you live longer.
