This week in Flutter #34: More about Flutter for Linux

In the previous issue of the newsletter, I linked an article about getting started with Flutter on Manjaro. Some days ago, the Ubuntu team published an article about flutter for desktop developers.

I hope that the Flutter experience on Linux gets better and better, both on the developer side and on the final app user side.

- Michele Volpato

Development 🧑‍💻

🔗 Motion Toast In Flutter

Are you tired of default, boring toast messages in your Flutter app? Have a look at the motion_toast package to spruce up your toasts. It comes with animations too. In this article, by Tusharkakkar, you’ll learn how to implement them in your project.

🔗 Effective handover of api responses to your code in dart

In this article by _theGingerGeek, you’ll learn how you can standardize your network responses in Dart so that your business layer does not need to handle errors and exceptions, but only a response that could be successful, or might have failed.

🔗 How to handle loading and error states with StateNotifier & AsyncValue in Flutter

Andrea Bizzotto published a new article. In this one, you’ll learn how easily you can handle errors and loading states in Flutter by using riverpod ’s [AsyncValue](https://pub.dev/documentation/riverpod/latest/riverpod/AsyncValue-class.html) and extending it using Dart’s extension. This is a good way of avoiding repetition in your code. Even if you do not plan to use this method, you should still understand it, to make the concept behind it part of your everyday coding.

🔗 Three hidden gems that help me scaling up my Flutter apps

In this article, Rémon Helmond talks about three packages/plugins that helped him develop Flutter applications at scale. The last two are particularly interesting if your codebase is considered big, and you need to separate your code into different parts that will be developed and maintained by different groups in your organization. A must-read.

Backend 🗄

🔗 How to make your Flutter app offline-first with Couchbase Lite

Learn how Gabriel Terwesten ended up creating their own version of a Couchbase package for Dart, and how to use it in your own project. It gives you offline first and full-text search, in a lite package.

Tools 🛠

🔗 Flutter CI/CD: GitHub Actions vs. Bitrise

In this article, the Bitrise team compares continuous integration and deployment with GitHub actions against their solution. The article is focused on Flutter development, but it can be followed by all mobile development teams, really.

Note: the Bitrise link is a referral link. If you create an account I will get some minutes for free.

Others 🤷‍♂️

🔗 How we built Appflowy with Flutter and Rust

Like many others, I do not dislike the UI of Notion. What I do not like is how closed the platform is. For this reason, I never used it. AppFlowy, on the other hand, mixes the UI of Notion with open source and data control. They use Flutter for this. If you would like to know how a relatively complex platform like this is designed and developed, go read this article.

🔗 How a meeting room booking system went from Flutter to Jira

Usually, I link articles about developing Flutter apps, but this article is a bit different. The people at Deviniti had a Flutter app for booking meeting rooms and they needed to integrate it into their daily work. So they migrated it to Jira. The article shows that sometimes targeting the right platform is better than having a multi-platform app.

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