Flutter Performance Updates in The First Half Of 2020

Being fast is a key pillar to Flutter. This article highlights performance improvements from the first half of 2020 implemented by folks from the Flutter community.

If you’ve helped out with performance after June 2020, we will cover that in a future post. We hope that sharing this with you, the Flutter community, inspires you to help us with this effort!

Quantified improvements

[app size] 18.5% reduction in Flutter Gallery app size

contributors:  alexmarkov,  sstrickl,  mkustermann,  askeksa-google,  rmacnak-google,  mraleph,  crelier

• Commit  f56b0f,  a2bb73,  d77f49,  e2faac,  8e7ffa,  76c628,  4ab9c7,  1c2d37,  27e64c,  6a7e4e, 054929
• 18.5% reduction ( 9.6MB to 8.1MB) the Flutter Gallery sample for Android

[app size] 100KB size reduction for Gallery app by font subsetting

contributors:  dnfield,  jonahwilliams,  zanderso,  jmagman,  blasten

• PR  #14828,  #49737,  #49842,  #50224,  #51808
• 100kb  size reduction in Flutter Gallery app
• Fixed “Tree shake material icons  #16311”, “Build hb-subset as part of engine builds and upload to cloud storage  #43642”, “Consume font-subset in flutter_tools and treeshake icon fonts #43644”, “Wire up font subsetting for all platforms  #49730”

[speed, memory] 9x speedup and 99+% memory reduction on dart2js tools

contributors:  rmacnak-google,  a-siva

• Commit  5b8c4e
• 9x speedup (46 to 5s) and 99+% memory reduction (537 to 1.5MB) on dart2js self compile, 1.5GB heap, 400MB heap snapshot

[speed] Up to 50% speedup for iOS average render speed by moving from OpenGL to Metal

contributors:  chinmaygarde,  dnfield,  jason-simmons,  cbracken,  amirh,  liyuqian

• PR  #8936,  #9383,  #11070,  #13056,  #13367,  #17080,  #17162,  #17154,  #17431
• 50% speedup (6ms to 4ms) for flutter_gallery_ios__transition_perf average_frame_rasterizer_time_millis
• Fixed “Flutter should use Metal instead of OpenGL on iOS  #18208”

#flutter #performance

What is GEEK

Buddha Community

Google's Flutter 1.20 stable announced with new features - Navoki

Flutter Google cross-platform UI framework has released a new version 1.20 stable.

Flutter is Google’s UI framework to make apps for Android, iOS, Web, Windows, Mac, Linux, and Fuchsia OS. Since the last 2 years, the flutter Framework has already achieved popularity among mobile developers to develop Android and iOS apps. In the last few releases, Flutter also added the support of making web applications and desktop applications.

Last month they introduced the support of the Linux desktop app that can be distributed through Canonical Snap Store(Snapcraft), this enables the developers to publish there Linux desktop app for their users and publish on Snap Store.  If you want to learn how to Publish Flutter Desktop app in Snap Store that here is the tutorial.

Flutter 1.20 Framework is built on Google’s made Dart programming language that is a cross-platform language providing native performance, new UI widgets, and other more features for the developer usage.

Here are the few key points of this release:

Performance improvements for Flutter and Dart

In this release, they have got multiple performance improvements in the Dart language itself. A new improvement is to reduce the app size in the release versions of the app. Another performance improvement is to reduce junk in the display of app animation by using the warm-up phase.

If your app is junk information during the first run then the Skia Shading Language shader provides for pre-compilation as part of your app’s build. This can speed it up by more than 2x.

Added a better support of mouse cursors for web and desktop flutter app,. Now many widgets will show cursor on top of them or you can specify the type of supported cursor you want.

Autofill for mobile text fields

Autofill was already supported in native applications now its been added to the Flutter SDK. Now prefilled information stored by your OS can be used for autofill in the application. This feature will be available soon on the flutter web.

A new widget for interaction

InteractiveViewer is a new widget design for common interactions in your app like pan, zoom drag and drop for resizing the widget. Informations on this you can check more on this API documentation where you can try this widget on the DartPad. In this release, drag-drop has more features added like you can know precisely where the drop happened and get the position.

Updated Material Slider, RangeSlider, TimePicker, and DatePicker

In this new release, there are many pre-existing widgets that were updated to match the latest material guidelines, these updates include better interaction with Slider and RangeSlider, DatePicker with support for date range and time picker with the new style.

New pubspec.yaml format

Other than these widget updates there is some update within the project also like in pubspec.yaml file format. If you are a flutter plugin publisher then your old pubspec.yaml  is no longer supported to publish a plugin as the older format does not specify for which platform plugin you are making. All existing plugin will continue to work with flutter apps but you should make a plugin update as soon as possible.

Preview of embedded Dart DevTools in Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio code flutter extension got an update in this release. You get a preview of new features where you can analyze that Dev tools in your coding workspace. Enable this feature in your vs code by _dart.previewEmbeddedDevTools_setting. Dart DevTools menu you can choose your favorite page embed on your code workspace.

Network tracking

The updated the Dev tools comes with the network page that enables network profiling. You can track the timings and other information like status and content type of your** network calls** within your app. You can also monitor gRPC traffic.

Generate type-safe platform channels for platform interop

Pigeon is a command-line tool that will generate types of safe platform channels without adding additional dependencies. With this instead of manually matching method strings on platform channel and serializing arguments, you can invoke native class and pass nonprimitive data objects by directly calling the Dartmethod.

There is still a long list of updates in the new version of Flutter 1.2 that we cannot cover in this blog. You can get more details you can visit the official site to know more. Also, you can subscribe to the Navoki newsletter to get updates on these features and upcoming new updates and lessons. In upcoming new versions, we might see more new features and improvements.

You can get more free Flutter tutorials you can follow these courses:

• Setup Flutter Desktop on Windows, Linux, MacOS using VSCode and Build – Flutter Tutorial
• Flutter Desktop Linux app | Build and Publish on Snapcraft Store
• Firebase Local Emulator Suite in Flutter

#dart #developers #flutter #app developed #dart devtools in visual studio code #firebase local emulator suite in flutter #flutter autofill #flutter date picker #flutter desktop linux app build and publish on snapcraft store #flutter pigeon #flutter range slider #flutter slider #flutter time picker #flutter tutorial #flutter widget #google flutter #linux #navoki #pubspec format #setup flutter desktop on windows

What is Flutter and why you should learn it?

Flutter is an open-source UI toolkit for mobile developers, so they can use it to build native-looking** Android and iOS** applications from the same code base for both platforms. Flutter is also working to make Flutter apps for Web, PWA (progressive Web-App) and Desktop platform (Windows,macOS,Linux).

Flutter was officially released in December 2018. Since then, it has gone a much stronger flutter community.

There has been much increase in flutter developers, flutter packages, youtube tutorials, blogs, flutter examples apps, official and private events, and more. Flutter is now on top software repos based and trending on GitHub.

Flutter meaning?

What is Flutter? this question comes to many new developer’s mind.

Flutter means flying wings quickly, and lightly but obviously, this doesn’t apply in our SDK.

So Flutter was one of the companies that were acquired by **Google **for around $40 million. That company was based on providing gesture detection and recognition from a standard webcam. But later when the Flutter was going to release in alpha version for developer it’s name was Sky, but since Google already owned Flutter name, so they rename it to Flutter.

Where Flutter is used?

Flutter is used in many startup companies nowadays, and even some MNCs are also adopting Flutter as a mobile development framework. Many top famous companies are using their apps in Flutter. Some of them here are

Dream11

NuBank

Reflectly app

Abbey Road Studios

and many more other apps. Mobile development companies also adopted Flutter as a service for their clients. Even I was one of them who developed flutter apps as a freelancer and later as an IT company for mobile apps.

#dart #flutter #uncategorized #flutter framework #flutter jobs #flutter language #flutter meaning #flutter meaning in hindi #google flutter #how does flutter work #what is flutter

Citrix Bugs Allow Unauthenticated Code Injection, Data Theft

Multiple vulnerabilities in the Citrix Application Delivery Controller (ADC) and Gateway would allow code injection, information disclosure and denial of service, the networking vendor announced Tuesday. Four of the bugs are exploitable by an unauthenticated, remote attacker.

The Citrix products (formerly known as NetScaler ADC and Gateway) are used for application-aware traffic management and secure remote access, respectively, and are installed in at least 80,000 companies in 158 countries, according to a December assessment from Positive Technologies.

Other flaws announced Tuesday also affect Citrix SD-WAN WANOP appliances, models 4000-WO, 4100-WO, 5000-WO and 5100-WO.

Attacks on the management interface of the products could result in system compromise by an unauthenticated user on the management network; or system compromise through cross-site scripting (XSS). Attackers could also create a download link for the device which, if downloaded and then executed by an unauthenticated user on the management network, could result in the compromise of a local computer.

“Customers who have configured their systems in accordance with Citrix recommendations [i.e., to have this interface separated from the network and protected by a firewall] have significantly reduced their risk from attacks to the management interface,” according to the vendor.

Threat actors could also mount attacks on Virtual IPs (VIPs). VIPs, among other things, are used to provide users with a unique IP address for communicating with network resources for applications that do not allow multiple connections or users from the same IP address.

The VIP attacks include denial of service against either the Gateway or Authentication virtual servers by an unauthenticated user; or remote port scanning of the internal network by an authenticated Citrix Gateway user.

“Attackers can only discern whether a TLS connection is possible with the port and cannot communicate further with the end devices,” according to the critical Citrix advisory. “Customers who have not enabled either the Gateway or Authentication virtual servers are not at risk from attacks that are applicable to those servers. Other virtual servers e.g. load balancing and content switching virtual servers are not affected by these issues.”

A final vulnerability has been found in Citrix Gateway Plug-in for Linux that would allow a local logged-on user of a Linux system with that plug-in installed to elevate their privileges to an administrator account on that computer, the company said.

#vulnerabilities #adc #citrix #code injection #critical advisory #cve-2020-8187 #cve-2020-8190 #cve-2020-8191 #cve-2020-8193 #cve-2020-8194 #cve-2020-8195 #cve-2020-8196 #cve-2020-8197 #cve-2020-8198 #cve-2020-8199 #denial of service #gateway #information disclosure #patches #security advisory #security bugs

Adobe XD plugin for Flutter with CodePen Tutorial

Recently Adobe XD releases a new version of the plugin that you can use to export designs directly into flutter widgets or screens. Yes, you read it right, now you can make and export your favorite design in Adobe XD and export all the design in the widget form or as a full-screen design, this can save you a lot of time required in designing.

What we will do?
I will make a simple design of a dialogue box with a card design with text over it as shown below. After you complete this exercise you can experiment with the UI. You can make your own components or import UI kits available with the Adobe XD.

#developers #flutter #adobe xd design export to flutter #adobe xd flutter code #adobe xd flutter code generator - plugin #adobe xd flutter plugin #adobe xd flutter plugin tutorial #adobe xd plugins #adobe xd to flutter #adobe xd tutorial #codepen for flutter.

Flutter App Development Trends 2020

As the new decade dawns upon us, a slew of technologies has been making a lot of noise to grab the developers’ attention. While native app development is going strong, the trade winds are now blowing towards going cross-platform.

Adobe PhoneGap, React Native, Xamarin and Ionic are all leaving no stone unturned to be the undefeated champion of cross-platform development. Still, Google’s Flutter is all set to take them all on at once.

There are a tonne of resources available online to learn about Flutter, and you can start with this step by step flutter guide.

With reduced code development time, increased time-to-market speed, near-native performance, and a bevy of advantages under its hood, Flutter is set to dominate the market this decade.

Before we take a look at trends making the Flutter race ahead in 2020, let us do a quick recap of what Flutter is, for those who have been living under a rock.

#flutter #flutter-for-mobile-app #flutter-app-development #mobile-app-development #flutter-trends #software-development #advantages-of-flutter-mobile #pros-and-cons-of-flutter