This week in Flutter #4

22 May 2021 — Newsletter

This week’s Google I/O brought us many talks about Flutter. I really enjoyed Why null safety? by Bob Nystrom. It gives you a very good explanation of why adding (sound) null safety static analysis to Dart is valuable, affordable, and flexible while giving examples of some other static analysis techniques that are not. Now that Dart added null safety, inspired by Swift Optionals, it is time to get super-powered enums, also inspired by Swift. Will this just be a dream?

Did you miss the Google I/O event? read what’s new in Flutter 2.2, from the Flutter team.

🧑‍💻 Development

How It’s Made: I/O Photo Booth

Do you want to know how Very Good Ventures Team created the photo boot for Google I/O 2021? Well, follow the link. The article does not give you a step-by-step tutorial to recreate the app, but it explains what challenges they faced and how they approached the problem. That is way better than a step-by-step tutorial.

An In-Depth Dive Into Streaming Data Across Platform Channels on Flutter

Learn about interacting with native platform APIs from Dart. This should be an article every Flutter developer should read. You might never need to use platform channels yourself, but knowing how they work will improve your understanding of Flutter plugins.

All You Need to Know About Downloading Images in Flutter

Some days ago I was having problems understanding the loadingBuilder parameter of a Image.network. The day after Vandad Nahavandipoor published this video. One day too late. 😄

An Introduction to Dart

Mark Mahoney started a series of articles about the basics of Dart and Flutter. He also wrote a free book on the subject. I am always happy to see organized content like this. Well done.

Announcing type aliases

The Dart team announced type aliases, introduced in Dart 2.13. Now you can do

typedef Json = Map<String, dynamic>;

class User {
  final String name;
  final int age;
  
  User.fromJson(Json json) :
    name = json['name'],
    age = json['age'];
    
  Json get json => {
    'name': name,
    'age': age,
  };
}

Codebases will become a little bit clearer. Just do not start abusing them!

🧑‍🎨 Design

Custom Neumorphic Shapes in Flutter

I am not a big fan of neumorphism, but it looks like it might become more relevant in app design. Ali Rıza Reisoğlu shows us how to create your own custom shapes using [flutter_neumorphic](https://pub.dev/packages/flutter_neumorphic).

🗄 Backend

Cloud, Dart, and full-stack Flutter | Q&A

Amazing Ask Me Anything about integration between Flutter and Google Cloud. If you are into Dart “server-side” you must watch this. For instance, have a look at Dart Function Framework.

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

Michele Volpato