The Flutter Bi-Weekly - Issue #12
What does new Dart features, UI challenges, and a Flutter mad scientist all have in common? They are all included in this week's Flutter Bi-Weekly!
Hello Internet 👋,
Another Sunday night means it's time for another issue of the Flutter Bi-Weekly!
It's hard to believe that we're already a month into the new year; time seems to be on hyper-speed these days.
The last two weeks have been filled with lots of new Flutter packages, content, and community discussions, so without using up all of the preview text, let's jump into things! 😉
Blogs ✍️
End-to-end Flutter Architecture Guide
Whether you are interviewing for a new Flutter role or looking to brush up on your existing architecture knowledge, Yatendra's comprehensive guides cover everything from Layer Model UIs to platform integration.
How to Build a Robust Flutter App Initialization Flow with Riverpod
It happens...you build an app, test it on a few devices, ship it to the store, and then a few days later, Sentry (or Twitter/X) reports an obscure issue with your app. To help ensure your users have a great experience each time they open your app, Andrea shares a few tips that can be used to handle errors during the initialization period 🚀
Create a Figma Clone app with Flutter and Supabase Real-time
Tyler from the Supabase team walks you through creating a real-time Figma-like app using Flutter and their real-time SDK. In their blog post, you will learn to create the database for the project, implement the UI using a custom painter, and bring it to life using their broadcasting features.
A PocketBase backend for Flutter and Dart
Pocketbase is the open-source backend for SAAS and mobile apps. In his latest post, Suragch walks you through the process of creating a Dart backend using Pocketbase complete with authentication and database support 🔌
Shorebird's Code Push for Flutter now in iOS beta
Shorebird's latest blog post announces their new iOS beta feature for Flutter: Code Push. This tool enables developers to push live updates to Flutter apps on iOS devices instantly, bypassing traditional app store updates. Check out their full release blog post to learn how to get started.
We Need To Talk About FlutterFlow
FlutterFlow has been receiving lots of attention recently following its $25M fundraising announcement. The tool allows developers to create Flutter apps visually by dragging and dropping components from their UI editor. In this comprehensive review, Andrea looks at using FlutterFlow to build an app, including creating custom components, testing integrations, and more.
Videos 🎥
Rotary passcode | Flutter UI challenge | Part 2: Animations
Eight months after the first part (yes really 🤪🙈), Mangirdas is back with part two in his Flutter UI series around creating a rotary password dial in Flutter. This video covers the fun parts of animation and gesture handling to give the dial its signature spin!
Observable Flutter 34: Code generation
Code generation, the one topic in Flutter that's more confusing to newcomers other than state management 🤪.
Flutter GDE Anna Leushchenko joins Flutter DevRel Craig Labenz to discuss how developers can use code generation libraries to accelerate development.
Flutter Made Science
Have you ever wondered how far you can push Flutter or some crazy projects you can build with Flutter?
Flutter's resident mad scientist and former team member Filip Hráček talks about doing just that in his Flutter Firebase Festival from September of last year.
Best Flutter Packages Of 2023
With over 11,000 Flutter and Dart packages released in 2023, Jay Ben breaks down the top 20 packages that are worth checking out for your next project 😎
Noteworthy Community Moments 💫
Upcoming Dart feature: Marcos!
In the not-too-distant future, the days of manually having to write `toJson` and `fromJson` methods might finally be coming to a close. Dart's experimental Marcos feature is being tested behind a feature flag on the latest version of Flutter's master branch. Check out the linked repository to explore the code or learn more 🤓
Note: This is very experimental, try out at your own risk!
Flutter is not too verbose to learn, but is too verbose to write
Over the last week, an interesting conversation has been happening on the r/FlutterDev subreddit regarding the current state of Flutter's syntax compared to newer UI toolkits such as Jetpack Compose and Swift UI. OP u/_ri4na compared the verbosity of creating simple UIs across the three main frameworks (Flutter, SwiftUI, and Jetpack Compose), highlighting the extra steps and lines of code needed.
Personally, after six years of the same syntax and verbosity, I'm in the camp of it's time to reevaluate Flutter's syntax and approach when it comes to handling Stateless vs. Stateful widgets, animations, etc. Very curious to hear what everyone else thinks, the entire discussion is worth a read.
Tweet of the Week 🥇
That's all folks 👋
I hope you enjoyed today’s issue of the Flutter Bi-Weekly! As always, I am very keen to get your feedback on the content and thoughts on the projects mentioned in today’s newsletter.
If you have a project, blog post or project you would like to share with the community in the next release, please feel free to send me message on Twitter/X or drop me an email 📧
– Nash