Currently, one cannot deny that there’s a strong push & demand for dark mode in each application regardless of the platform. Google Trends shows us that the search term has been definitely trending since 2018. The reasons are simple: it’s easier on your eyes when using the app at night, it saves some battery especially if your device uses an OLED screen, and the most important one: it looks cool.

In programming, just like in real life, our individual skills can’t always be used to solve a given problem efficiently but we can search for and use tools that will do that for us. In this blog post, I’d like to share with you a couple of useful VS Code extensions that I use in my daily development process and find to be of great value.

Flutter Widget Snippets

This extension contains a number of useful code snippets which can in turn speed up your development process. Here is a list of the most interesting ones. …

Here is a collection of 6 small things that many developers forget or are unaware of while developing their Flutter apps but can substantially improve the development process.

Widgets, widgets, widgets!

You may have probably heard that Flutter is all about widgets. Widgets here, widgets there, and so on. My first piece of advice is this:

Reduce your UI elements to as many small widgets as possible.

Let me elaborate. The two common scenarios we’d like to prevent are as follows:

1. A huge widget class with one huge build method (aka the worst imaginable case)
2. A huge widget class with lots of build…

Hey you! Yes, you. Have you ever experienced inconvenience while developing an app while your backend wasn’t ready yet? Or did the backend guys mess something up again? Then mock data is what you need. But what’s the proper way of using it? Let’s take a closer look.

The solution

In the course of this article, you will learn to do the following things:

1. Represent your test data as JSON files and include them in your project.
2. Create a mock interceptor for your HTTP client.
3. Inject the interceptor using dependency injection based on the current environment.

JSON mocks

To begin with, I hope you…

Do you ever lay in bed and wonder what is the best way of including custom icons into your Flutter project? No? Me neither. But now that you are here I guess I have no other choice but to just tell you about this secret. It’s a rather short one so don’t get too comfortable.

Flutter icon generator

The secret is rather simple, it’s this generator right here: FlutterIcon. It will handle all necessary code generation steps for creating the correct Flutter class and a corresponding font that will include your icons. …

Whether to use dependency injection in your Flutter project is not such a hard question to answer. You should. That’s it. But what is dependency injection anyways? Well… let me explain with a simple example of what you should always do in your code.

Let’s say we have a user repository class that manages users in our app. It uses 2 other classes:

• UserDataSource — a remote user data source for communicating with the backend used for user authentication.
• SecureStorage — a secure storage class that manages saving and retrieving things from storage.

So let’s define our user repository class…