After a handful of months of hard work, we’re excited to announce our latest collaboration with Google and the Flutter team: it’s a cross-platform GenUI demo called Hatcha!
What is it?
GenUI is an experimental SDK from Google that gives AI control to compose UIs at runtime based on context.
The gskinner team is well known in the Flutter community for combining innovative design with creative coding to build robust, beautiful applications. Over the past 20 years, our experienced designers and developers have consistently been challenged by our clients to push the boundaries of their platforms — from high-performance fintech dashboards to the best social casino experience we shipped for a major entertainment client, whose real-time multiplayer requirements forced us to rethink how Flutter handles state at scale. When FlutterFlow came to us to apply this experience to their platform, we were intrigued by the potential to empower our designers and narrow the gap between the design and production phase. Starting fresh, we embarked on this journey and were surprised by what we learned along the way.
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!
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”.
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.
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.
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.