This week in Flutter #15: Isolates, Flutter animations, side effects, and Adobe XD to Flutter version 3. Find out the best content of this week about Flutter.

7 August 2021 — Newsletter

Microsoft is pushing development for the Surface Duo. They published a package for dual-screen apps. Personally, I do not see this kind of device becoming popular. also did not see taking pictures using a tablet becoming popular, but they keep adding cameras on the back of entry-level tablets, so my opinion does not count much 😅.

In a small team, you need to make some compromises when you decide what to work on from the backlog, and if you have to choose between supporting dual-screens and, well, anything else, you often choose the latter. At least until Apple announces a dual screen tablet.

- Michele Volpato

🧑‍💻 Development

Flutter counter app, but using isolates

In Flutter, you can use Isolates to run code in parallel. If you need to perform some laborious task in the background, like searching inside a big zip file, then you can defer the computation to a separate thread by spawning an Isolate. In this short and simple article, Hrishikesh Pathak recreates the counter app using Isolates.

Side Effects in Flutter: What they are and how to avoid them

When you start with Flutter, you often end up adding a lot of code in the build method. For instance, you might fire a Future, or change the state. That leads to chaos. Andrea Bizzotto teaches you how to avoid such chaos. This is a must-read for new Flutter developers. Print the DOs and DONTs at the end of the article and stick them on the ceiling in your bedroom.

Adding Micro-Interactions With AnimatedSwitcher

Micro-interactions are those small animations that you do not notice, but that make the user experience so much better. They can be the reason why users keep or stop enjoying your app. [Alejandro Ulate Fallas](https://www.raywenderlich.com/u/codingalecr) shows you how to get started with micro-interactions in your app.

🛠 Tools

XD to Flutter v3.0

A new major version of XD to Flutter has been released, congratulations to Grant Skinner. I only used the first version of the plugin, and my team was evaluating the second version, as a prototyping tool our designer could use. Happy to see that the project is still active.

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,