Another episode of The Boring Flutter Development Show has been released. Khanh and Craig discussed using generic widgets.

📌 You can watch the episode by the link.

#boringshow

Flutter IntelliJ Plugin has recently received an update. This release cycle was primarily focused on fixing problems and reducing tech debt. It contains:

👉 device selector shows meaningful names;
👉 fixed ignored breakpoints when there was a space in the project path;
👉 process for the plugin should be terminated when IDE shuts down.

📌 More details by the link.

#update

The VSCode Flutter plugin has also been updated. Things included to release:

👉 add multiple dependencies in one step;
👉 hover documentation supported the base HTML tags;
👉 added a new Flutter-task for the generation of localization files.

📌 All these, and a lot of fixes and improvements, are in the detailed changelog by the link.

#update

One more easy way to add animation to UI is an AnimatedDefaultTextStyle. This is an implicit animation widget, which means that the property changing is enough for playing an animation. But pay attention to the fact that not all property will be animated. The textAlign, softWrap, overflow, maxLines, textWidthBasis, and textHeightBehavior properties are not animated and take effect immediately when changed.

📌 More details on the api.flutter.dev by the link.

#widget

There are a lot of Flutter communities in the world. For example, our Flutter Voronezh. But be honest, in Europe and North America this process in the very beginning. I was glad to find a new Flutter community, which had been recently created in Silicon Valley. I think this fact is a good sign of the interest of the west business in Flutter, and it shows us that interest will continue to grow.

📌 This community makes regular meetups, one of them was recent. How it was, you can read in the article.

#article #meetup

In the latest Widget of the Week, Flutter team has shown FocusableActionDetector, which combines the functionality of Actions, Shortcuts, MouseRegion, and Focus widgets.

📌 More details in the video.

#widgetoftheweek

You have a lot of ways to automate routine actions, and of course, using noscripts too. There are make, bash, etc. But Flutter developer has one more good tool for this - Dart. And in my case, it’s an often choise. When we were doing the boilerplate generation tool for Elementary, there was using this way - the core part uses Dart. My ex-colleague, who made it by his hand, has recently released an article about it.

📌 How it can be really realized, you can read in his article (in Russian).

#article

In the rapid development process, not a rare situation when we affect a previous feature. Moreover, we can break them. To avoid this, use regression testing.

📌 What is it and how to use it with Flutter, read in the article by Pragati.

#article #testing

Flutter 3 release was really surprising but of course exciting. And Flutter Dev Podcast couldn’t give up on it. Doesn’t matter that podcast has been recently released, after a long enough time, it had been recorded hot on the trail, and emotions were really fresh there.

🎧 You can listen to this episode by link, as well as on Apple Podcasts, Yandex.Music, Google Podcasts, Spotify.

#podcast

Even professionals with strong experience are usually restricted by what they really did. I think that sharing this real experience is a big deal for the community. Mikhail Matiunin (aka Fox) has recently started a series of practice tips, that include various things: from the Dart singleton implementation to possible troubles with tail call optimization absent in Dart.

📌 Hashtag #tipoftheday on LinkedIn is an easy way to find these tips.

#tips

We can customize every widget by setting properties while describing UI. But there is a simpler way to do this. If you do not set a special value, widgets use a value from the theme. And if set up the theme once, you will avoid a lot of additional work.

📌 More details about this are in the article by Jelena Lecic.

#article

To continue the topic of theme setup, be useful to mention theme extensions, which have recently been added. Setting up widgets from common libraries never was big trouble, but if we wanted to use the same approach with our self-made widgets, we were enforced to make tricks. With the release of theme extensions, we received really simple and flexible work with theming.

📌 More details are in the Decoding Flutter video.

#decodingflutter

There will be garbage after any work. And the runtime isn’t an exception. The Garbage Collector’s responsibility to clean this. And how it will be efficient has a direct influence on the final impression of program work. Dart has no problem with this. It uses a generational approach to collect garbage.

📌 More details about Dart’s Garbage Collector are in the old but gold article by Matt Sullivan.

#article

All kinds of finite-state machines, and for example EventBus pattern, are not rare in game dev. And fact that a special BLoC variation appeared when there were often talks about Flutter for games, is not a surprise. Recently this package has taken a new 1.4.0 API version.

📌 More details in the announcement by the VGV team.
PS. examples with “hundred percent test coverage” using SVG instead of the real tests are also available as always 😄

#article

Using imitations (aka mocks) really helpful for testing. Especially for unit-testing. Mockito and Mocktail libraries are used for it in Flutter. I preferer the last one.

📌 A simple and short guide about this process by Hasan Basri Bayat.

#article #testing

Mason is a template code generator, which has been shown in the latest package of the week video.

📌 More details in the video.

#packageoftheweek

Fuchsia became available for the first time to use on Nest Hab about a year ago. And there was news recently, that now Google made it also available for Nest Hub Max as a preview. You only need to accept a Preview Program on your Nest Hub Max to take this update.

📌 More details about this update by links: first and second.

#update

Documentation is the one of most important parts of production code. When we have documentation, we don’t need to read a lot of code source lines, against we can just read human-friendly denoscriptions to understand or recall, how something works. In Dart, we use a Dart-doc format for documentation.

📌 What it is, and how it works, in the article by Hussain Habibullah.

#article

Dart can be used for various things on a large count of platforms. And the new episode of The Boring Flutter Development Show is right about it. Simon Lightfoot and Craig Labenz are going to create a distributed counter app, using Flutter, WebSockets, shelf, Google Cloud Run, and Redis.

📌 The first episode of this journey already is able to watch.

#boringshow

Why build apps with Flutter - it is a strange question in 2022nd, in my opinion. Answers to it are really obvious. But often it is so if you are already inside this technology. I met a few people recently, which know about Flutter, but their idea about it is frozen on the 2019th, to my surprise.

📌 I think the article from VGV can be useful for all people, who are outside the Flutter yet but want to know - why build apps with Flutter.

#article

Big and popular applications have a lot of features, which give interesting opportunities or just look really cool. Repeat something like this is already a good result and training your skills.

📌 Example of this - Uber-style live location tracking, in the article by the link.

#article