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.
Occasionally in Flutter, you will need to get the size and/or position of a widget. Some common use cases for this are:
You need to measure something and make some decision based on that. For example, you might switch from an expanded column, to a scrolling column, at a certain height threshold.
You may want enable or disable a scrollbar based on the height of some content
The parent needs to know your position. For example if when you tap a menu button, the parent wants to animate a dot to that position, we need the button to be able to report its position somehow.
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.
The site we made for the 2019 CAMP Festival for creatives recently won an Applied Arts award for Community Promotional Design! To celebrate, we looked back at some of the assets that went into the site experience.
I’m very excited about the v1.0 release of the “XD to Flutter” plugin for Adobe XD. While the prerelease versions were interesting, and occasionally handy for grabbing a style or shape, the addition of responsive layout support in 1.0 makes it a genuinely useful tool for creating beautifully designed widgets and even simple views.
Now that the first production release is available, I thought I’d write up a short blog post that introduces the plugin, and helps you get started using it.
If you’d prefer not to read, you can check out this Adobe Creative Cloud video on LinkedIn that features Will Larche from Google describing what Flutter is, and me (@~17:00) talking about the XD to Flutter plugin.
I saw some Blender Grease Pencil animations by Dedouze and got inspired by what the tool seemed to offer. The Grease Pencil tool is like a typical drawing tool made for Blender. It allows you to draw in 3D space as well as make and play animations in real-time. Pretty neat right? The closest thing I can compare it to is one of those 3D pens that lets you “draw” in a 3D space.
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!