This week in Flutter #21: Create stunning applications with ease using this Flutter package

Have you seen the [universal_widget](https://github.com/mrgoonie/flutter_universal_widget) by Goon Nguyen? The amount of code you save to create interesting animations is promising, but I wonder if your code will become too difficult to understand when a new developer joins your team.

In other news, Microsoft now lets you login into online services without a password. I’d love to see this become the standard and I wonder when all the services we use for authentication in Flutter apps will implement something similar. What do you think?

- Michele Volpato

Development 🧑‍💻

🔗 Slivers in Flutter - Part (2), Part (3), and Part (4)

[Dhruv Nakum](https://hashnode.com/@Dhruv-Nakum) continues the series on Slivers in Flutter with three more articles! As in the first article in the series, there are many examples and animated images. Bookmark these pages because you will need them sooner or later.

🔗 Automated Unit Testing with GitHub Actions

Being able to run tests automatically when you push to your codebase, or when you open a pull request in GitHub, will help you spot regression bugs early in the development process. It also ensures that code written by others does not break existing functionalities (if you wrote tests for them). How do you automatically run tests on your Flutter project using GitHub Actions? Read this short article by Reme Le Hane.

🔗 Building an app to view and share satellite imagery 🛰

Sometimes you build an app just because you are learning something new. Sometimes you build it because a client requested it from you. And sometimes you just create a tool that you need. Like Emery Silberman, who made an app that shows images taken by satellites and shares them with friends. The article explains the initial problem Emery had, and how he tackled several challenges he encountered while coding the app.

🔗 Creating an end-to-end project, from Node.js backend to Flutter app

Learn how to implement both the backend and the frontend of a Flutter project in this tutorial by Thiago Evoá.

🔗 Flutter camera plugin: A deep dive with examples

Souvik Biswas takes you on a journey into all the nooks and crannies of the camera plugin.

🔗 Flutter — Why you should use small widgets

You should always aim to have small components in your app code. It makes the code more readable and maintainable. As Valentin Vignal shows in this article, it can also help with build performance. Adding on Valentin’s article, you should not perform complex computation in the build method.

Tools 🛠

🔗 Automating Flutter Apps using Appium

It is a common case to write automated testing only for your business logic. UI testing can become so complicated that it is much easier to use exploratory testing on the app running on a real device. But as the app grows in functionalities, having automated UI testing will help fighting regression bugs. Not all testers in your team might have a good grasp on Dart, and if they prefer python, they can use Appium to write tests for the Flutter app. If you are curious about the process, read this article by Ranvir Chhina.

Backend 🗄

🔗 Using Firebase Cloud Functions to Generate URL Preview

Do you want to show URL previews in your Flutter app? If you use Firebase as your backend system, then you can follow this easy tutorial by Paurakh Sharma Humagain.

Others 🤷‍♂️

🔗 Flutter: What’s next on the Web?

Mariam Hasnany from the Flutter team tells you more about Flutter for web, from the fact that over 10% 😱 of Flutter projects target the web, to the priorities and what to expect in the coming releases.

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,

- Michele Volpato