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

You must clearly understand what you need when studying something - technology, language, etc. Otherwise, there is not a small chance to waste a lot of time on useless things and don’t reach the result. And of course, Flutter doesn’t exception. Moreover, it is a rapidly growing framework, and this fact complicates the problem to choose what is important or not. I have thought a lot of time about the question - what does Flutter developer must know? And standing on my own experience built the knowledge and skills map.

📌 You can find it by the link.

#advice

Flutter IntelliJ Plugin has been recently updated. One of the most awaited features in this release is a monorepo project support for Flutter. Now we don’t need to find tricky ways for this anymore. It works out of the box.

📌 More details changelog by the link.

#update

Flutter Dart Code for VSCode has taken an update too. In this release:

👉 a new setting that allows regenerating localization when .arb is saved;
👉 a new setting to make simple fetching dependencies in nested projects;
👉 a lot of fixes and improvements for future SDK.

📌 More details changelog by the link.

#update

Lint rules are a good way to increase the quality of the project. There are useful sets for Dart and Flutter already: flutter_lint and rules from dart_code_metrics. But if you want something very special and custom for your project, you need to be familiar with analyzer_plugin. At least before recent times. Invertase has released a package custom_lint the other day. This library help with creating new custom rules in an easier way.

📌 More details are in the article by Majid Hajian.

#article

Flutter is not only a mobile framework already. Bottom Navigation Bar of course a helpful widget for mobile navigation, but isn’t cut out for the desktop or web. A good alternative is the NavigationRail, which was shown in the last Widget of the Week.

📌 More details are in the Widget of the Week video.

#widgetoftheweek

InheritedWidget is an important concept in Flutter. The Flutter team has talked about it not once. The last one Decoding Flutter is not an exception. This theme was explained again.

📌 More details are in the Decoding Flutter video.

#decodingflutter

Flame is a modular game engine for Flutter.

📌 How to create a simple 2D game using Flame and integrate the project with Codemagic for build and share, read in the article by Ivy Walobwa.

#article

A good infotainment system is an important part of modern auto. Since Flutter’s available platforms have been growing, using it in vehicles also is possible. At least Toyota thinks the same.

📌 Research about using Flutter for multimedia systems in auto in the article (on the Russian language) by dmitriizolotov.

#article

It is a critical requirement to understand how your technology, tool, etc works. Without this, it is easy to make a lot of painful mistakes. The latest Decoding Flutter video explained one of that stuff. What will happens if works with BuildContext asynchronously, why it is a bad way, and why do we need to work with it synchronously?

📌 More details in the Decoding Flutter video.

#decodingflutter