This week in Flutter #39: A new Flutter event. For Windows developers

There is a new Flutter event next week, apparently tailored to Windows developers. This could mean two things:

1. new developer tools that run on Windows;
2. Flutter for Windows getting out of beta.

I am going to bet on the latter. Flutter grew a lot in the last couple of years. Having the possibility to release a version of our apps to Windows users is a big win for my team. I also wonder if Flutter for Ubuntu is also getting out of beta and if there is even a more general Flutter for Linux on the horizon. Given that you create snaps, you should be able already to distribute them on other Linux distributions.

What do you think? Let me know in the comment section below.

- Michele Volpato

Development 🧑‍💻

🔗 The dark side of Flutter: 4 inconveniences that every Flutter developer should know

Flutter is not perfect, we know that. David Serrano Canales explains some aspects of Flutter that every company should consider when choosing whether to use it for their customer-facing applications. All of them are valid points, but I must say that I use plenty of native apps, and I still complain about their size. Adding 5MB to a 140MB app does not look like an issue to me.

🔗 Functional Error Handling in Flutter

Mario Pepe shares how he uses functional programming to handle errors in his Flutter apps. He claims that some elements of functional programming can be beneficial in state-based applications. I would say that all software can benefit from functional programming. Go read the article and find out why.

🔗 Publishing Flutter Windows apps to Microsoft Partner Center

Next week the Flutter team should announce some updates specifically for Windows developers. You should get ready by reading this article by the Codemagic team, in case you never published a Windows app before.

🔗 Drawing Bezier curves and Splines with CustomPaint flutter

What a nice article Jahswill Essien came up with, explaining Bezier curves, and providing Flutter code to draw them in your own app. Careful, there is math inside!

🔗 Creating Custom Gestures in Flutter

Is your app so niche that you need custom gestures for it? Read how Alejandro Ulate Fallas uses advanced techniques in Flutter to get non-standard gestures in a lock-picking app.

🔗 Simplified Flutter Localization using a BuildContext extension

Andrea Bizzotto shared an article about improving how AppLocalizations works in Flutter. First, he gets rid of the forced unwrap (the ! operator). Then he extends BuildContext to move from AppLocalizations.of(context) to context.loc. While I am totally in with the former, I am not going to apply the latter in my projects. I think the code will be clearer for a newcomer if I keep the AppLocalizations.of(context) nomenclature. But this should not stop you from using context.loc. It all depends on your team preference.

Backend 🗄

🔗 Firebase Release Notes January ‘22 🎦

New updates for Firebase, announced, as usual, by Frank van Puffelen. This update includes some really nice improvements for Flutter apps. I like to be able to configure the Firebase project directly in Dart. I use flavors in all the apps I work on, and handling the JSON configuration files in the native folders, possibly with pre-build scripts, becomes annoying easily.

Others 🤷‍♂️

🔗 Show Test Coverage of a Flutter app in Visual Studio Code

I did not know you could visualize code coverage this easily in Visual Studio Code. This is definitely getting mentioned in the stand-up next Monday. This article was written by Alex.

🔗 Flutter: Our favorite pub.dev libraries

Not my favorites, Shawn Blais favorites. Still worth having a look at. 😀

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