Flutter Chat Application with Cloud Firestore & Firebase Authentication

In this Flutter tutorial, we will be building a simple Chat application with basic Firebase Authentication and a Cloud Firestore database to back up the messages.

Source Code for this example: https://github.com/tensor-programming/chat_app_live_stream

#flutter #firebase

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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

Multi-cloud Spending: 8 Tips To Lower Cost

A multi-cloud approach is nothing but leveraging two or more cloud platforms for meeting the various business requirements of an enterprise. The multi-cloud IT environment incorporates different clouds from multiple vendors and negates the dependence on a single public cloud service provider. Thus enterprises can choose specific services from multiple public clouds and reap the benefits of each.

Given its affordability and agility, most enterprises opt for a multi-cloud approach in cloud computing now. A 2018 survey on the public cloud services market points out that 81% of the respondents use services from two or more providers. Subsequently, the cloud computing services market has reported incredible growth in recent times. The worldwide public cloud services market is all set to reach $500 billion in the next four years, according to IDC.

By choosing multi-cloud solutions strategically, enterprises can optimize the benefits of cloud computing and aim for some key competitive advantages. They can avoid the lengthy and cumbersome processes involved in buying, installing and testing high-priced systems. The IaaS and PaaS solutions have become a windfall for the enterprise’s budget as it does not incur huge up-front capital expenditure.

However, cost optimization is still a challenge while facilitating a multi-cloud environment and a large number of enterprises end up overpaying with or without realizing it. The below-mentioned tips would help you ensure the money is spent wisely on cloud computing services.

• Deactivate underused or unattached resources

Most organizations tend to get wrong with simple things which turn out to be the root cause for needless spending and resource wastage. The first step to cost optimization in your cloud strategy is to identify underutilized resources that you have been paying for.

Enterprises often continue to pay for resources that have been purchased earlier but are no longer useful. Identifying such unused and unattached resources and deactivating it on a regular basis brings you one step closer to cost optimization. If needed, you can deploy automated cloud management tools that are largely helpful in providing the analytics needed to optimize the cloud spending and cut costs on an ongoing basis.

• Figure out idle instances

Another key cost optimization strategy is to identify the idle computing instances and consolidate them into fewer instances. An idle computing instance may require a CPU utilization level of 1-5%, but you may be billed by the service provider for 100% for the same instance.

Every enterprise will have such non-production instances that constitute unnecessary storage space and lead to overpaying. Re-evaluating your resource allocations regularly and removing unnecessary storage may help you save money significantly. Resource allocation is not only a matter of CPU and memory but also it is linked to the storage, network, and various other factors.

• Deploy monitoring mechanisms

The key to efficient cost reduction in cloud computing technology lies in proactive monitoring. A comprehensive view of the cloud usage helps enterprises to monitor and minimize unnecessary spending. You can make use of various mechanisms for monitoring computing demand.

For instance, you can use a heatmap to understand the highs and lows in computing visually. This heat map indicates the start and stop times which in turn lead to reduced costs. You can also deploy automated tools that help organizations to schedule instances to start and stop. By following a heatmap, you can understand whether it is safe to shut down servers on holidays or weekends.

#cloud computing services #all #hybrid cloud #cloud #multi-cloud strategy #cloud spend #multi-cloud spending #multi cloud adoption #why multi cloud #multi cloud trends #multi cloud companies #multi cloud research #multi cloud market

Flutter Firestore Tutorial - Mobile CMS app for Firestore | Part 1

This app can be of great use for someone who want to manage the data in the data base on the go !

I’ll cover all the basics and advance queries in this series. So subscribe to the channel and press the bell icon to get the notification as soon as next part comes up!

https://youtu.be/5TqxA81B-XM

https://thegrowingdeveloper.org for more tutorials

#flutter #flutter-firestore #cloud-firestore-flutter #flutter-tutorial #flutter-firebase

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

CSS Flexbox Tutorial | Build a Chat Application

Creating the conversation sidebar and main chat section

In this article we are going to focus on building a basic sidebar, and the main chat window inside our chat shell. See below.

Chat shell with a fixed width sidebar and expanded chat window

This is the second article in this series. You can check out the previous article for setting up the shell OR you can just check out the chat-shell branch from the following repository.

https://github.com/lyraddigital/flexbox-chat-app.git

Open up the chat.html file. You should have the following HTML.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
    <meta charset="utf-8" />
    <title>Chat App</title>
    <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen" href="css/chat.css" />
</head>
<body>
    <div id="chat-container">
    </div>
</body>
</html>

Now inside of the chat-container div add the following HTML.

<div id="side-bar">
</div>
<div id="chat-window">
</div>

Now let’s also add the following CSS under the #chat-container selector in the chat.css file.

#side-bar {
    background: #0048AA;
    border-radius: 10px 0 0 10px;
}
#chat-window {
    background: #999;
    border-radius: 0 10px 10px 0;
}

Now reload the page. You should see the following:-

So what happened? Where is our sidebar and where is our chat window? I expected to see a blue side bar and a grey chat window, but it’s no where to be found. Well it’s all good. This is because we have no content inside of either element, so it can be 0 pixels wide.

Sizing Flex Items

So now that we know that our items are 0 pixels wide, let’s attempt to size them. We’ll attempt to try this first using explicit widths.

Add the following width property to the #side-bar rule, then reload the page.

width: 275px;

Hmm. Same result. It’s still a blank shell. Oh wait I have to make sure the height is 100% too. So we better do that too. Once again add the following property to the #side-bar rule, then reload the page.

height: 100%;

So now we have our sidebar that has grown to be exactly 275 pixels wide, and is 100% high. So that’s it. We’re done right? Wrong. Let me ask you a question. How big is the chat window? Let’s test that by adding some text to it. Try this yourself just add some text. You should see something similar to this.

So as you can see the chat window is only as big as the text that’s inside of it, and it is not next to the side bar. And this makes sense because up until now the chat shell is not a flex container, and just a regular block level element.

So let’s make our chat shell a flex container. Set the following display property for the #chat-window selector. Then reload the page.

display: flex;

So as you can see by the above illustration, we can see it’s now next to the side bar, and not below it. But as you can see currently it’s only as wide as the text that’s inside of it.

But we want it to take up the remaining space of the chat shell. Well we know how to do this, as we did it in the previous article. Set the flex-grow property to 1 on the #chat-window selector. Basically copy and paste the property below and reload the page.

flex-grow: 1;

So now we have the chat window taking up the remaining space of the chat shell. Next, let’s remove the background property, and also remove all text inside the chat-window div if any still exists. You should now see the result below.

But are we done? Technically yes, but before we move on, let’s improve things a little bit.

Understanding the default alignment

If you remember, before we had defined our chat shell to be a flex container, we had to make sure we set the height of the side bar to be 100%. Otherwise it was 0 pixels high, and as a result nothing was displayed. With that said, try removing the height property from the #side-bar selector and see what happens when you reload the page. Yes that’s right, it still works. The height of the sidebar is still 100% high.

So what happened here? Why do we no longer have to worry about setting the height to 100%? Well this is one of the cool things Flexbox gives you for free. By default every flex item will stretch vertically to fill in the entire height of the flex container. We can in fact change this behaviour, and we will see how this is done in a future article.

Setting the size of the side bar properly

So another feature of Flexbox is being able to set the size of a flex item by using the flex-basis property. The flex-basis property allows you to specify an initial size of a flex item, before any growing or shrinking takes place. We’ll understand more about this in an upcoming article.

For now I just want you to understand one important thing. And that is using width to specify the size of the sidebar is not a good idea. Let’s see why.

Say that potentially, if the screen is mobile we want the side bar to now appear across the top of the chat shell, acting like a top bar instead. We can do this by changing the direction flex items can flex inside a flex container. For example, add the following CSS to the #chat-container selector. Then reload the page.

flex-direction: column;

So as you can see we are back to a blank shell. So firstly let’s understand what we actually did here. By setting the flex-direction property to column, we changed the direction of how the flex items flex. By default flex items will flex from left to right. However when we set flex-direction to column, it changes this behaviour forcing flex items to flex from top to bottom instead. On top of this, when the direction of flex changes, the sizing and alignment of flex items changes as well.

When flexing from left to right, we get a height of 100% for free as already mentioned, and then we made sure the side bar was set to be 275 pixels wide, by setting the width property.

However now that we a flexing from top to bottom, the width of the flex item by default would be 100% wide, and you would need to specify the height instead. So try this. Add the following property to the #side-bar selector to set the height of the side bar. Then reload the page.

height: 275px;

Now we are seeing the side bar again, as we gave it a fixed height too. But we still have that fixed width. That’s not what we wanted. We want the side bar (ie our new top bar) here to now be 100% wide. Comment out the width for a moment and reload the page again.

So now we were able to move our side bar so it appears on top instead, acting like a top bar. Which as previously mentioned might be suited for mobile device widths. But to do this we had to swap the value of width to be the value of height. Wouldn’t it be great if this size was preserved regardless of which direction our items are flexing.

Try this, remove all widths and height properties from the #side-bar selector and write the following instead. Then reload the page.

flex-basis: 275px;

As you can see we get the same result. Now remove the flex-direction property from the #chat-container selector. Then once again reload the page.

Once again we are back to our final output. But now we also have the flexibility to easily change the side bar to be a top bar if we need to, by just changing the direction items can flow. Regardless of the direction of flex, the size of our side bar / top bar is preserved.

Conclusion

Ok so once again we didn’t build much, but we did cover a lot of concepts about Flexbox around sizing. 

#css #programming #webdev