Google is known for moonshot projects. Often they’re just that, without much hope of being brought to fruition in the near future. But Flutter is not one of those: it’s here now and it works, wonderfully.

Flutter was released back in 2017 as a mobile development framework aiming to seamlessly bridge Android and iOS development without taking away any control over the hardware and low-level operating system features from the hands of the software developer, like many other frameworks do. …

This post is the third out of four in a series of posts about automating everyday tasks using scripting languages. The first one was an introduction to the hypothetical problem of having to take images divided into subfolders and dump all of them in one folder while altering their name and adding text over them to know what folder they came from (hypotheticall revealing the location where the pictures were taken) to solve and a first simple solution using Bash and ImageMagick.

In the second post we switched to Python and solved the https://carmine.dev/posts/wandpython/ same problem in a better way…

This article is the first in a series of posts about automating everyday actions. We’ll start with Bash shell scripting, which allows you to write scripts to automate dull, repetitive tasks.

The great advantage of Bash shell scripting compared to writing a full CLI tool to do what we need is that it is very easy to do, especially for those familiar with the Bash shell already, but it is only feasible to build Bash scripts that can be used for a very limited range of applications.

The problem to solve

Let’s identify a problem anyone can have at some point in life: editing…

I’ve been teasing the release of the book for a while, now it’s available as a beta book from the Pragmatic Bookshelf and you can buy it, mostly content complete. There you can also find extracts and read those instead of reading this boring description of it.

Why Flutter Matters

Flutter allows you to write apps for Android, iOS and Fuchsia without having to manage three different codebases, while being able to write UIs in a declarative way without the need for external UI files. …

I am European, but I’m not British, so I learned English as a second language and, very early in my English learning journey, I faced a conflict that I found very confusing at the time.

On my English books I saw that a certain word (which I learned as the English word equivalent to the Italian word “colore”) was spelled “colour”.

The “u” was, for me, the main difference between the English and the Italian word (the fact that many English words “are missing the last letter” wasn’t new to me), so seeing, some time later, that one of my…

One of the packages I highlighted in my recent tour of the best Flutter packages on Pub is the image_picker package, which allows you to add an image selection dialog to a Flutter app.

For example, let’s suppose you want to have an app to showcase the best pictures you have taken, so you need to have two things: a screen to show the pictures and a dialog to add a picture, either by selecting an existing picture or by taking a picture.

What we’ll be building is an app that will look something like this:

One of the things Flutter makes easier and better when compared to all other mobile development frameworks and SDKs is using third-party and Google-developed libraries.

An introduction to packages

90% of the time you just need to go on https://pub.dartlang.org/flutter, find the package you want and add the Installing section to the pubspec.yaml file in the root of the app’s source tree.

Many of the packages might eventually make it into the Flutter standard library, but most of them are stable, complete and dependable even in their current state on Dart Pub.

My personal selection of the best and most essential packages

There are some packages on Pub that are needed for many apps…

The world of technology and software is ever-changing and that means you need to stay on top of the news in order to avoid being caught out only being able to work with outdated technologies and frameworks.

We’re still in the app “bubble” apparently

Good news: yes, it looks like the biggest market for software development is still the mobile app market.

More and more people are doing more of their computing on mobile devices and using their desktop computers less, so the need for a mobile-specific experience, so you don’t need to worry about

But it’s not the same as it was a few years ago…