This week in Flutter #5

Last week’s Google I/O is still lingering, and more resources have been released, in particular on the Flutter YouTube channel. Furthermore, the Flutter Community has been posting new articles again.

🧑‍💻 Development

Building scrolling experiences in Flutter

Slivers can be used to add very neat custom scrolling effects to your app. In this workshop, Kate Lovett shows how to use them to make your user experience much more interesting.

Let’s make the Flutter Navigator 2

I have been fighting recently with Flutter Navigation 2.0 a couple of weeks ago. If you want to save yourself a big headache, read this article by Ali Yazdi first, so you get an idea of what you are getting into.

just_audio tutorials

Suragch has been busy creating tutorials on how to get started with the just_audio package. How to play short audio clips, how to stream audio, and how to manage a playlist. I also wrote some tutorials on how to use just_audio, but I have to admit that they are not at Suragch’s level.

Dart collections with DartX extensions

Anna Domashych shows us how to work with collections more elegantly, by using the dartx package. Really, why isn’t that package just part of base Dart?

Creating a Cat Voting App with Flutter

Bart van Wezel had some fun creating a cat-voting app using the cat API. I like seeing funny projects like this one.

Improving Code Quality With Dart Code Metrics

Static code analysis won’t necessarily improve your coding skills, but it certainly helps with keeping your coding style consistent within your organization.Dart Code Metrics is a plugin for the Dart analyzer that reports code metrics, checks for anti-patterns, and provides additional static analysis rules. Dmitry Krutskikh talks about it in this article.

🧑‍🎨 Design

FlutterLogo (100th Widget of the Week!)

The Flutter YouTube channel reached the 100th widget of the week. You probably won’t use this one, but it is a good reason for celebrating. 🎉

Colors / Numbers Game with Flutter Implicit Animations

Andrea is one of my favorite Flutter content creators. In this video, he shows a simple game that uses implicit animations. Andrea is also releasing a course about animations in Flutter. I haven’t had the opportunity to follow the course yet, but it is on my to-do list, and once I do, I will let you know how it is.

🗄 Backend

Going full-stack with Flutter and Supabase - Part 2: Database

I already mentioned Supabase in a previous issue of this newsletter. In this article, Christos Giallouros goes deep into the database part of a Flutter/Supabase app. I like that using a relational database for app development has become as easy as using a Firestore instance.

🤷‍♂️ Others

Programming on your phone

We often assume that mobile developers have a computer at their disposal to create apps. Suragch has been tasked with teaching a mobile development class for students with no access to computers. This article reports the challenges faced during the evaluation of possible alternatives to use a computer for mobile development. While reading the article, I thought of an even simpler solution: 1. write the code and sync with GitHub, as in the article; 2. trigger a CI/CD build on Bitrise that deploys the app via Firebase App Distribution. It will not be as fast as the proposed solution in the article because you lose instant feedback while you write code, but you do not need a server.

[The Bitrise link is a referral link].

Flutter in production: Stadia and Google Pay

Flutter is used in production by Google. In this interesting Q/A, Google engineers discuss their programming and design choices for Stadia and Google Pay.

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