shawn.blais

Shawn has worked as programmer and product designer for over 20 years, shipping several games on Steam and Playstation and dozens of apps on mobile. He has extensive programming experience with Dart, C#, ActionScript, SQL, PHP and Javascript and a deep proficiency with motion graphics and UX design. Shawn is currently the Technical Director for gskinner.

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Flutter: Crafting a great experience for screen readers

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.

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XD to Flutter v4: Better Layout Code

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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XD to Flutter v3.0

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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Flutter: sized_context – An easier way to access MediaQuery.size!

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.

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