Choosing what platform to build your new app in is always a challenge. Usually, you’ll default to what you know, be that Angular, React, Vue. etc. Sometimes that decision is made for you, sometimes, if you’re lucky, you can define it for yourself. In my case using TypeScript, React and Fluent UI to build applications has been the best development decision I’ve made in a long time.
Continue reading →With the introduction of NNBD in Dart 2.12, a new keyword was created: late. The primary reason this was created was to allow for non-null fields, that did not have to be immediately initialized.
// Allow this to be null for now, compiler trusts us, that we will assign it.
late final int i;
MyConstructor(){
i = getStartIndex(); // Compiler checks at this point, everything is ok!
i = null; // This will cause an error, compiler is enforcing non-null
}
This was a necessary feature/workaround for Flutter, because of darts requirement to use const initializers, and most Flutter developers are likely familiar with it by now. In this post we’re going to look at some of the other benefits of late!
gskinner’s latest collaboration with Google is a new multi-platform scrapbooking app built with Flutter.
One of the trickier things to do in Flutter is to get the size of things.
Generally there are 3 use cases you might have:
The first 2 are quite simple so we’ll just skim them. The 3rd is more interesting.
Continue reading →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 →Occasionally in Flutter, you will need to get the size and/or position of a widget. Some common use cases for this are:
Recently we’ve been exploring the ability to extend the base State<T> class, to add additional capabilities to our views, or writing our own custom Mixins to do the same.
Most Developers are familiar with using the various framework Mixins, like TickerProviderStateMixin but what is not commonly known, is how easy it is to create your own flavors of these. Additionally, many developers extend State<T> constantly, and write very repetitive boilerplate code, without realizing how easy it is to create their own BaseState<T> instead.
In this example, we’ll make a “base state” that provides 3 AnimatorControllers to any widget that needs to animate something. We could then apply this to any Widget in our application, and it automatically get 3 animators to play with. No setup, or teardown required.
Continue reading →