This week in Flutter #16: Will we be able to fully code Flutter apps with an iPad?

14 August 2021 — Newsletter

GitHub is moving forward with its Codespaces tool. You can fire up a project from a GitHub repository in seconds and work on the code from a browser or Visual Studio Code.

Will it be possible to have your project running in a macOS environment stack? You do not need it for Flutter development, and Codespaces seems to be marketed to web developers.

Working on a Flutter app via browser from an iPad, preview the web version, and then trigger a test build on your CI to test the mobile versions does not sound smooth to me. What do you think? Would you like to be able to code your Flutter app from a browser?

- Michele Volpato

🧑‍💻 Development

How to Parse JSON in Dart/Flutter: The Essential Guide

Your app likely needs to get data from some APIs. Such data is probably provided in JSON format. Andrea Bizzotto shows you the basics of parsing JSON data in Dart.

Integrate Amazon Lex With Flutter App

Chatbots are becoming more and more important for the support strategy of a company. Amazon Lex is one of the tools you can use to provide such a feature in your app. Monikinderjit Singh has a simple tutorial to get it integrated with a Flutter app.

Subtle Flutter mistake I made today

When you share your code, you want to share your achievements, not your mistakes. That is why I like this small article by [Indy Garcia](https://hashnode.com/@Indy9000). I must say that I made that mistake as well in the past, and I am sure you did as well.

🤷‍♂️ Others

Validating flutter at scale

If you tried to buy or sell a house in the Netherlands, then you know Funda. On their website, you find the majority of houses for sale, and you can contact the estate agent directly. In this article, the engineering team explains how they evaluated Flutter “for feature teams to build features simultaneously on web and mobile apps”.

HeroMode helps to disable the hero animation of a Hero widget. Why would you want to disable the animation of a Hero widget you added to the tree willingly? The most common case is when you have nested Navigators. You want the widget to animate only when the child Navigator is used.

History of Flutter

Are you curious about how Flutter was born and released? [Tadas Petra](https://twitter.com/tadaspetra) published a short video telling you all the main events since the Sky Engine.

What can we do better to improve Flutter? — Q2 2021 user survey results

The results for the quarterly survey from the Flutter team are out. Surprisingly, some developers are concerned about expanding Flutter to web and desktop apps. They would prefer the team to focus on mobile. My team and I were very happy with porting a mobile app to the web. The process was fairly painless, it saved time and money. I do not think we would have been able to release the web version in time if it was not for Flutter.

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,