This week in Flutter #141: Flutter at Google I/O 2024

1 June 2024

Google I/O happened, and a small part of it was about Flutter. Flutter 3.22 was released, together with Dart 3.4. As expected, most of the event was focused on AI, and Flutter is not immune, as you will see in some of the links below.

For hardware reasons, much of the “AI work” is done server-side, with the Flutter app being just a way to let the user interact with it.

On-device AI is a cooler concept if your app needs it. Especially for desktop Flutter apps, which can take advantage of powerful devices, like M4 Apple machines.

- Michele Volpato

🧑‍💻 Development in Flutter

Best practices for optimizing Flutter web loading speed

by Cheng Lin

In this article, you’ll learn how to improve both the initial loading and rendering performance of your Flutter web app.

Styling your Dart Jaspr website with Tailwind CSS and DaisyUI

by Dinko Marinac

A common counterpoint about Flutter for Web is the fact that the resulting web app is a nightmare for SEO. One way to work around this limitation is using a framework like Jaspr, which renders normal HTML/CSS. But what if you are not familiar with CSS? Then you can use a component library, like DaisyUI.

🛠️ Tools to improve your Flutter experience

What’s New in the Flutter SDK for Firebase

Vertex AI, WebAssembly support, enhanced query capabilities in Firestore, and FlutterFire CLI improvements. Read also a more general What’s new in Firebase at I/O 2024.

Flutter: Choosing Mobile UI Tests Automation Tool

by Pavel Sulimau

Are you considering a UI tests automation tool that QA engineers can use, without knowing much about Flutter? Luckily for you, Pavel has already investigated the available solutions and he wrote a report for you.

🎥 Flutter videos

Observable Flutter #43: On-device LLMs with Gemma

with Craig Labenz

Learn how to run Gemma on a MacOS system, the capabilities of the model, and its interaction with the sample application.

Flutter at Google I/O 2024 Playlist

Here is the playlist of all Flutter talks at Google I/O.

👨‍💻 Software engineering

Healthy Documentation

by Vadim Kravcenko

Here’s a question for you, which is better:

Writing someone an email, knocking them out of their focus zone, asking to explain how a piece of software works
Or looking up the necessary information yourself and processing that at your own pace.

Hint: It’s the second one.

Using a dev diary seems to be worthwhile

by Mike Hogan

“An experiment for devs to try. I started keeping a “dev diary” while working on Breezbook. It was prompted by a statement by Stuart Ervine when I asked how others keep broader context of decisions behind code that are not visible in code, tests or comments. He said that at Apple, developers on teams keep diaries, and each team member can browse what others are thinking.”

That’s it for this week.

If you want to comment on any of this week’s entries, you can do it in the comment section below.

Have a bug-free week,