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Flutter is the future of mobile app development 👏👏👏
Flutter is a new mobile app SDK to help developers and designers build modern mobile apps for iOS and Android.” The modern, reactive …
I dabbled a bit in Android and iOS development quite a few years back using Java and Objective-C. After spending about a month working with both of them, I decided to move on. I just couldn’t get into it.
But recently, I learned about Flutter and decided to give mobile app development another shot. I instantly fell in love with it as it made developing multi-platform apps a ton of fun. Since learning about it, I’ve created an app and a library using it. Flutter seems to be a very promising step forward and I’d like to explain a few different reasons why I believe this.
Powered by Dart
Flutter uses the Google-developed Dart language. If you’ve used Java before, you’ll be fairly familiar with the syntax of Dart as they are quite similar. Besides the syntax, Dart is a fairly different language.
I’m not going to be talking about Dart in depth as it’s a bit out of scope, but I’d like to discuss one of the most helpful features in my opinion. This feature being support for asynchronous operations. Not only does Dart support it, but it makes it exceptionally easy.
This is something you’ll most likely be using throughout all of your Flutter applications if you’re doing IO or other time-consuming operations such as querying a database. Without asynchronous operations, any time-consuming operations will cause the program to freeze up until they complete. To prevent this, Dart provides us with the async and await keywords which allow our program to continue execution while waiting for these longer operations to complete.
Let’s take a look at a couple of examples: one without asynchronous operations and one with.
// Without asynchronous operations
import 'dart:async';
main() {
longOperation();
printSomething();
}
longOperation() {
Duration delay = Duration(seconds: 3);
Future.delayed(delay);
print('Waited 3 seconds to print this and blocked execution.');
}
printSomething() {
print('That sure took a while!');
}
And the output:
3 seconds to print this and blocked execution.
That sure took a while!
This isn’t ideal. No one wants to use an app that freezes up when it executes long operations. So let’s modify this a bit and make use of the async and await keywords.
// With asynchronous operations
import 'dart:async';
main() {
longOperation();
printSomething();
}
Future<void> longOperation() async {
var retVal = await runLongOperation();
print(retVal);
}
const retString = 'Waited 3 seconds to return this without blocking execution.';
Duration delay = Duration(seconds: 3);
Future<String> runLongOperation() => Future.delayed(delay, () => retString);
printSomething() {
print('I printed right away!');
}
And the output once again:
I printed right away!
Waited 3 seconds to return this without blocking execution.
Thanks to asynchronous operations, we’re able to execute code that takes a while to complete without blocking the execution of the rest of our code.
Write Once, Run on Android and iOS
Developing mobile apps can take a lot of time considering you need to use a different codebase for Android and iOS. That is unless you use an SDK like Flutter, where you have a single codebase that allows you to build your app for both operating systems. Not only that, but you can run them completely natively. This means things such as scrolling and navigation, to name a few, act just like they should for the OS being used.
To keep with the theme of simplicity, as long as you have a device or simulator running, Flutter makes building and running your app for testing as simple as clicking a button.
UI Development
UI development is one of those things that I almost never look forward to. I’m more of a backend developer, so when it comes to working on something that is heavily dependent on it, I want something simple. This is where Flutter shines in my eyes.
UI is created by combining different widgets together and modifying them to fit the look of your app. You have near full control over how these widgets display, so you’ll always end up with exactly what you’re looking for. For laying out the UI, you have widgets such as Row, Column, and Container. For content, you have widgets like Text and RaisedButton. This is only a few of the widgets Flutter offers, there are a lot more. Using these widgets, we can build a very simple UI:
@override
Widget build(BuildContext context) {
return Scaffold(
appBar: AppBar(
title: Text('Flutter App'),
centerTitle: true,
elevation: 0,
),
body: Row(
mainAxisAlignment: MainAxisAlignment.center,
children: [
Column(
mainAxisAlignment: MainAxisAlignment.center,
children: [
Container(
child: Text('Some text'),
),
Container(
child: RaisedButton(
onPressed: () {
// Do something on press
},
child: Text('PRESS ME'),
),
),
],
),
],
),
);
}
Flutter has more tricks up its sleeve that makes theming your app a breeze. You could go through and manually change the fonts, colors, and looks for everything one by one, but that takes way too long. Instead, Flutter provides us with something called ThemeData that allows us to set values for colors, fonts, input fields, and much more. This feature is great for keeping the look of your app consistent.
theme: ThemeData(
brightness: Brightness.dark,
canvasColor: Colors.grey[900],
primarySwatch: Colors.teal,
primaryColor: Colors.teal[500],
fontFamily: 'Helvetica',
primaryTextTheme: Typography.whiteCupertino.copyWith(
display4: TextStyle(
color: Colors.white,
fontSize: 36,
),
),
),
With this ThemeData, we set the apps colors, font family, and some text styles. Everything besides the text styles will automatically be applied app-wide. Text styles have to be set manually for each text widget, but it’s still simple:
child: Text(
'Some text',
style: Theme.of(context).primaryTextTheme.display4,
),
To make things even more efficient, Flutter can hot reload apps so you don’t need to restart it every time you make a change to the UI. You can now make a change, save it, then see the change within a second or so.
Libraries
Flutter provides a lot of great features out of the box, but there are times when you need a bit more than it offers. This is no problem at all considering the extensive number of libraries available for Dart and Flutter. Interested in putting ads in your app? There’s a library for that. Want new widgets? There are libraries for that.
If you’re more of a do-it-yourselfer, make your own library and share it with the rest of the community in no time at all. Adding libraries to your project is simple and can be done by adding a single line to your pubspec.yaml file. For example, if you wanted to add the sqflite library:
dependencies:
flutter:
sdk: flutter
sqflite: ^1.0.0
After adding it to the file, run flutter packages get and you’re good to go. Libraries make developing Flutter apps a breeze and save a lot of time during development.
Backend Development
Most apps nowadays depend on some sort of data, and that data needs to be stored somewhere so it can be displayed and worked with later on. So keeping this in mind when looking to create apps with a new SDK, such as Flutter, is important.
Once again, Flutter apps are made using Dart, and Dart is great when it comes to backend development. I’ve talked a lot about simplicity in this article, and backend development with Dart and Flutter is no exception to this. It’s incredibly simple to create data-driven apps, for beginners and experts alike, but this simplicity by no means equates to a lack of quality.
To tie this in with the previous section, libraries are available so you can work with the database of your choosing. Using the sqflite library, we can be up and running with an SQLite database fairly quickly. And thanks to singletons, we can access the database and query it from practically anywhere without needing to recreate an object every single time.
class DBProvider {
// Singleton
DBProvider._();
// Static object to provide us access from practically anywhere
static final DBProvider db = DBProvider._();
Database _database;
Future<Database> get database async {
if (_database != null) {
return _database;
}
_database = await initDB();
return _database;
}
initDB() async {
// Retrieve your app's directory, then create a path to a database for your app.
Directory documentsDir = await getApplicationDocumentsDirectory();
String path = join(documentsDir.path, 'money_clip.db');
return await openDatabase(path, version: 1, onOpen: (db) async {
// Do something when the database is opened
}, onCreate: (Database db, int version) async {
// Do something, such as creating tables, when the database is first created.
// If the database already exists, this will not be called.
}
}
}
After retrieving data from a database, you can convert that to an object using a model. Or if you want to store an object in the database, you can convert it to JSON using the same model.
class User {
int id;
String name;
User({
this.id,
this.name,
});
factory User.fromJson(Map<String, dynamic> json) => new User(
id: json['id'],
name: json['name'],
);
Map<String, dynamic> toJson() => {
'id': id,
'name': name,
};
}
This data isn’t all that useful without a way to display it to the user. This is where Flutter comes in with widgets such as the FutureBuilder or StreamBuilder. If you’re interested in a more in-depth look at creating data-driven apps using Flutter, SQLite, and other technologies, I encourage you to check out the article I wrote on that:
https://medium.com/@erigitic/using-streams-blocs-and-sqlite-in-flutter-2e59e1f7cdce
Final Thoughts
With Flutter, the possibilities are practically endless, so even super extensive apps can be created with ease. If you develop mobile apps and have yet to give Flutter a try, I highly recommend you do as I’m sure you’ll fall in love with it as well. After using Flutter for quite a few months, I think it’s safe to say that it’s the future of mobile development. If not, it’s definitely a step in the right direction.
#mobile-apps #flutter
What is GEEK
Buddha Community
1595059664
How long does it take to develop/build an app?
With more of us using smartphones, the popularity of mobile applications has exploded. In the digital era, the number of people looking for products and services online is growing rapidly. Smartphone owners look for mobile applications that give them quick access to companies’ products and services. As a result, mobile apps provide customers with a lot of benefits in just one device.
Likewise, companies use mobile apps to increase customer loyalty and improve their services. Mobile Developers are in high demand as companies use apps not only to create brand awareness but also to gather information. For that reason, mobile apps are used as tools to collect valuable data from customers to help companies improve their offer.
There are many types of mobile applications, each with its own advantages. For example, native apps perform better, while web apps don’t need to be customized for the platform or operating system (OS). Likewise, hybrid apps provide users with comfortable user experience. However, you may be wondering how long it takes to develop an app.
To give you an idea of how long the app development process takes, here’s a short guide.
App Idea & Research
_Average time spent: two to five weeks _
This is the initial stage and a crucial step in setting the project in the right direction. In this stage, you brainstorm ideas and select the best one. Apart from that, you’ll need to do some research to see if your idea is viable. Remember that coming up with an idea is easy; the hard part is to make it a reality.
All your ideas may seem viable, but you still have to run some tests to keep it as real as possible. For that reason, when Web Developers are building a web app, they analyze the available ideas to see which one is the best match for the targeted audience.
Targeting the right audience is crucial when you are developing an app. It saves time when shaping the app in the right direction as you have a clear set of objectives. Likewise, analyzing how the app affects the market is essential. During the research process, App Developers must gather information about potential competitors and threats. This helps the app owners develop strategies to tackle difficulties that come up after the launch.
The research process can take several weeks, but it determines how successful your app can be. For that reason, you must take your time to know all the weaknesses and strengths of the competitors, possible app strategies, and targeted audience.
The outcomes of this stage are app prototypes and the minimum feasible product.
#android app #frontend #ios app #minimum viable product (mvp) #mobile app development #web development #android app development #app development #app development for ios and android #app development process #ios and android app development #ios app development #stages in app development
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Hire Dedicated Flutter App Developer USA| Flutter App Developers
Hire Flutter App Developers: WebClues Infotech is a Flutter App Development company. Our Flutter mobile app development team can create cross-platform apps for different industry verticals. Our Flutter developers will help you extend your business’s scope by developing enhanced functionality and a feature-rich app. To provide a rich user experience to your users, hire dedicated Flutter app developers from WebClues Infotech today!
#hire flutter app developers #hire dedicated flutter app developer usa #hire flutter app developer usa #hire dedicated flutter app developer #hire flutter developer #flutter app development company
1597014000
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
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List Of The Top Pittsburgh Mobile App Development Companies
https://clutch.co/app-developers/pittsburgh
Let’s look at the list of top list of the top Pittsburgh mobile app development companies which are known for providing top-notch services globally. They are great developers who provide quality services for all your needs.
#mobile app developers #mobile app development services #mobile app development #mobile app developers #mobile apps #mobile app development solutions
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Top 10 Mobile App Development Companies in India
https://yourstory.com/mystory/top-10-mobile-app-development-companies-in-india-djq13xfgd8
Here’s a rundown of Top 10 mobile app development companies in India, carefully evaluated on the various performance indicators based on proven track record and diversified portfolio, quality of end-product, experience, core technical expertise, project management strategy, adherence to timelines and budget, app prototyping and UI/UX design.
#mobile app development #mobile app development company #mobile app development services #mobile app developers #mobile app development solutions #mobile apps