This week in Flutter #12

17 July 2021

Google hosted the Games Developers Summit 2021 this week. There is not much about Flutter, but some talks might be useful for Flutter developers as well. For instance, Personalizing your app in real-time: Powered by Firebase and ML, or What’s new for Firebase LiveOps.

Let me know if there was some other talk that you found interesting.

- Michele Volpato

🧑‍💻 Development

Understand Constraints in Flutter

Do you ever wonder why sometimes you set the width of a container and nothing changes in your layout? That is because you did not understand constraints. Learn about constraints in Flutter in this article by Dany Tulumidis.

Getting Started With Flutter

[Jonathan Sande](https://twitter.com/Suragch1) updated the beginner tutorial about Flutter on raywenderlich.com to Flutter 2.2. The previous version was for Flutter 1.7, a bit outdated 😁.

Flutter Tutorial - Keep Screen Awake [2021] Wakelock

Did you know you can prevent the device screen from going into sleep mode directly from your Flutter app? I did not. Here is a very short tutorial on how to do it by Johannes Milke.

Cat and Mice – Part 3: Implementing the Game

Bart van Wezel is back with the next iteration of his game built from scratch with Flutter. This week he implements the menu and the game logic. It is nice to follow the app being built, reading about the challenges he faces.

Learn Flutter Animations in 8 Minutes + Free Gallery App on GitHub

A deep and detailed article by Andrea Bizzotto on Flutter animations. In the article, he discusses implicit animations, tweens, explicit animations, and built-in explicit transition widgets. He also provides an app you can download to showcase all the animations shown in the article, and more. Definitely recomended.

The flutter “const” Keyword demystified

We have all written

Padding(
    padding: EdgeInsets.all(16.0),
    child: ...
    ...

But should we be using const?

Padding(
    padding: const EdgeInsets.all(16.0),
    child: ...
    ...

In this article, Kefeh Collins teaches us about the const keyword, what it represents, and when we should use it.

🧑‍🎨 Design

How to use Google Fonts in a Flutter application

Chris Bongers shares how easy it is to use Google Fonts in your Flutter app. If you are a beginner, you should check Chris’ website. He is learning Flutter and sharing daily something new he learns.

🛠 Tools

Excluding Dart files from static analysis

Jordan Holland shows us how to get rid of all those problems that the static code analyser finds in generated code. You should not edit generated code, so you either avoid using code generating tools 😢, or exclude the generated files from the analysis 🥳.

🤷‍♂️ Others

Flutter Web: Should I use it? (Part 4— I believe so)

Reme Le Hane concludes the Flutter Web: Should I use it? series with suggestions for developing an app that is for both mobile devices and web browsers. I am a big fan of reusing your code as much as possible. I keep all the code that can be shared in some shared widgets, and I use separated widgets when the code differs.

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,