This week in Flutter #87: My favorite announcements from Flutter Forward

28 January 2023

There was Flutter Forward this week. Do not despair if you didn’t watch live. You can watch the video or, even better, read the articles shared by the Flutter and Dart teams.

The most important one is What’s new in Flutter 3.7 which explains what you can already use in Flutter 3.7. In Introducing Dart 3 alpha, instead, you will learn about some upcoming features of Dart.

Some of my favorite articles are those regarding concurrency: Introducing background isolate channels and Better isolate management with Isolate.run().

And there are also articles about updates to apps implemented as use cases of the newest features of Flutter: How it’s made: Holobooth, Flutter: Adapting Wonderous for Landscape, and Adapting Wonderous to larger device formats

This time the Flutter and Dart teams decided to share some internal demos/presentations with the entire community. My favorite ones are linked later in this newsletter.

- Michele Volpato

Development in Flutter 🧑‍💻

Introducing Hive UI: A Flutter Package for Easily Managing Your Hive Database

by Amr Said

Hive is a key-value database written in Dart. If you need an easy way to view and edit the data, you can use Hive UI.

Flutter: Communicate with external devices through a serial port

by Ahmed Mannai

Who doesn’t need to connect to a serial port from Flutter? I never needed to, but if you do, you can use the Dart libserialport package or this Flutter wrapper. Then let me know what you are doing with it.

Brick - A New, Offline GraphQL Client Based on SQLite in Flutter

by Tim Shedor

Brick is an extensible query interface for Dart applications. In this article, you learn how to use Brick and fetch the same data from GraphQL, memory, or SQLite.

Backend for Flutter developers 🗄

Top cloud development tips for Flutter developers

with Craig Labenz and Martin Omander

“Flutter and Dart run on all of your users’ devices, but what about on the server? Can you continue to use your Dart skills when writing the server-side logic that powers your app? Of course you can!

Follow along with this end-to-end guide to server-side development, written specifically for Flutter and Dart developers.”

Flutter videos 🎥

Bringing pattern matching to Dart

with Bob Nystrom

Some issues ago I linked the specification for Records in the Dart repository. Now, these changes are confirmed in Dart 3.0, and in this talk, you will see examples of these features.

To me, coming from Swift, it sounds unbelievable that tuples were not available yet.

Preview: Multiple windows on desktop

with Michael Goderbauer

“In this talk, you’ll get an early preview of what it will look like to render content into multiple windows from a single Flutter app.”

What I really like is that all windows are in the same widget tree, so it is easy to share data across them.

What is Impeller?

with Chinmay Garde

One of the things I do not like is pre-compiling shaders before shipping a new version of a Flutter app. So, when Impeller was announced I had high hopes for it. A colleague has just enabled it in one of the apps we are working on and I am looking forward to seeing the result.

Software supply chain security for Flutter and its ecosystem

with Godofredo Contreras and Alexander Thomas

Flutter’s software supply chain security is not a hot topic. Or at least it is not as hot as state management solutions. But if you care about your users, and you should, you need to understand how threat actors can attack and what the Dart and Flutter teams do to reduce the efficiency of such attacks.

Software engineering in general 👨‍💻

Awesome Software and Architectural Design Patterns

by Dov Amir

A curated list of software and architecture-related design patterns.

Examples of floating point problems

by Julia Evans

Julia lists some examples of floating point bugs shared by the community. There is also a list of for integers as well.

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,