Flutter is growing stronger all around the world, with 2022 being its breakthrough year in terms of popularity. As the official Flutter 2023 Strategy document states, you can already find over 700,000 apps in Play Store built with Flutter (numbers from January 2023). When you compare its usage to other cross-platform tools, Flutter clearly has a competitive edge. With its hot reload function and highly effective rendering engine, it allows businesses to create seamless, beautiful apps that run across different environments.
Whether you’re trying to expand your existing Flutter skills or just noticed the buzz and you’re trying to make sense of it for your business, the internet is full of valuable knowledge sources on this toolkit. However, sometimes they might be hard to find. But we’ve got you covered, having gathered the most interesting recent talks on Flutter in this article.
At Miquido, we have been advocating for Flutter for years, using it in our projects on a daily basis. This year, seeing its growth, we decided to contribute to its community by organizing a Flutter-themed event in Kraków. Some of the talks below come from our “Cross feat. Flutter” conference, but we also included other valuable materials in our list. What’s more, our team created one of the first Flutter projects in the world, but we didn’t stop there! :)
Let’s dive into the fascinating world of Flutter! We promise that at the end of this journey, you’ll be richer with new valuable knowledge ready to implement in your daily work.
Brief talk about theming and Material Design 3 in Flutter — Pawel Kastelik
Let’s start with a talk that both the designers and developers will find interesting. Pawel Kastelik, who prepared it, has been working with Flutter since its first release, so he certainly knows the drill!
His talk is a great opportunity to get familiar with Material Design 3, an essential tool for anyone working with Android apps. The latest bold update has allowed designers to adapt products to the dynamic colour settings of user devices in Android 12 and enables them to use updated components such as the search bar. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg! If you’re curious about what’s new with Material 3, you may want to check Pawel’s insights.
Paweł starts with the topic of theming, showing step-by-step how to implement it in Flutter. After tips on Material 3, he shares good practices for designers and developers. In brief and on-point bullet points, he points out what’s worth doing to avoid costly mistakes, from naming variables to implementing dark mode. He learned it the hard way so that you don’t have to, so feel free to use these insights! PS. Watch it until the end — there’s a surprise!
The secret element of Flutter BuildContext — Darja Orlova
If you’ve come into contact with Flutter already, you definitely had to came across BuildContext class. This talk touches on this topic, exploring what context actually is, how to work with it, and how to avoid common errors when writing the Dart code.
Its author, Darja, is a Latvian Women Tech Makers Ambassador, a co-founder of the Bunny Search app which facilitates finding cruelty products, and a Flutter developer and Mobile tech lead at Chilli agency. As a part of her daily work routine, Darja carries out a lot of code reviews, seeing a lot of similar errors on the devs’ side, which, as she states, often come from a lack of understanding of BuildContext.
Darja starts her talk by explaining the basic concepts of Flutter, including the widgets and their rendering. Although it is often stated that in Flutter, everything is a widget, she proves that it is not quite so, giving a more nuanced point of view. Then she moves to the core of her talk, explaining the BuildContext and common error types in relation to it, both lifecycle- and position-in-the-tree related.
If you want to understand the ideas behind one of the fundamental concepts of Flutter better and reduce the issues that could come with its misunderstanding, this talk is for you!
Make the code work for you: Flutter Code Generation — Mangirdas Kazlauskas
Another informative talk during our event focused on Flutter code generation tools. Nowadays, that time has more value than ever, and the competitive market forces companies to search for effectiveness-boosting solutions; code generation is grabbing more and more attention. If you’re looking for ways to make the development phase more productive but less labour-consuming, you may want to hear it out.
Although our guest states that it’s just a brief introduction to a deep topic, don’t be deceived! No wonder he can tell us so much about Flutter — he is a Google Developer Expert for Flutter & Dart and organizer of Flutter Vilnius, another Flutter-oriented event in neighbouring Lithuania. Plus, if you stumbled across a Flutter-themed meme, it’s very likely that he made it!
Mangridas starts his talk by explaining what code generation is, then moves to particular case studies, first exploring localisation. He looks into different packages that allow developers to avoid implementing boilerplate code, reducing labour input. You can count on some valuable insights on tools, for instance, the often overlooked issues with go_router.
Sharing Dart code between mobile and backend — Dominik Roszkowski
Now it’s time to explore the backend side of Dart language! Dominik Roszkowski, who, like Mangridas, is a Google Developer Expert for Flutter, will share his insights on Dart backend frameworks like Serverpod, dart_frog, or shelf. If you are planning to build a backend for your Flutter app, Dominik is here to help you handle the challenges often met along the way.
His talk dives into the core of Dart, analysing its pros and cons for backend development and the practical aspects of its implementation. You will come to know how to share the code between a Flutter app and a backend server, enabling seamless communication via websockets for real-time updates. Dominik also covers the topic of cloud functions, which has been a tough nut to crack for Dart developers, as well as the dart_frog library, a tool that can significantly simplify backend development with its hot reload and file routing support.
What’s new in Dart and Flutter — Flutter’s official YT channel
If you want to keep yourself updated about the changes in Flutter and Dart and use the full potential of these powerful tools, Flutter’s official channel on YouTube is a great source of information.
This particular video covers the novelties that the 3.10 version of Flutter and the 3.0 version of Dart bring to designers and developers. It’s a perfect starting point for any Flutter newbie, and a great update-in-a-nutshell for those who have been using it for some time.
It will provide you with insights on how:
- you can benefit from new elements in Dart, such as patterns and class modifiers.
- you can optimize your design with orb shaders the support of which extends to the web with Flutter 3.10.
- Material 3 can help you optimize the user experience and develop even more seamless UIs aligned with the newest technological trends.
- Dart 3 guarantees 100% null safety.
- Flutter 3.10 allows you to bring more vibrant imagery to users with breakthrough graphic performance.
…and much more!
Security in Flutter apps — Majid Hajian
We couldn’t have ended our list in any other way than with the security aspect of Flutter development now that the frequency of cyberattacks is rising worldwide. The talk you’re about to hear was recorded during the “Flutter Heroes 2023” conference in Torino, which our developers from Miquido had the pleasure to attend.
Its author, Majid Hajian, is an organizer of Flutter Vikings, another popular event on the subject, attracting numerous Flutter enthusiasts every year. As he states at the beginning of his speech, more than 75% of mobile applications will fail basic security tests. That only underlines the urgency of security good practices he gets you through in an info-packed 30 minutes.
Having pointed out the 10 major security risks for mobile applications according to OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project), he then provides tips complying with Flutter’s security pillars: identify, detect, protect. For anyone developing a Flutter app or planning to do so, this talk will be a wealth of knowledge in terms of security aspects.
Summing up
That’s where our list ends, but the Internet is full of insightful materials on Flutter, so let the research be your best friend! Meanwhile, we encourage you to participate in Flutter-themed meetups. As you can see, they provide you with plenty of opportunities to gather practical knowledge, plus you get to interact with like-minded tech enthusiasts and exchange experiences first-hand.
See you soon!
