Flutter Experience — Beginner

How a graphic designer takes a step towards app development

I was a Graphic designer and was designing User Interfaces for mobile applications and websites. I give my design to the developers and they ask me the design in various formats. They speak the so-called ‘Developer Language’ and asked me to make changes in my design. I too did it without understanding why they’ve asked me to so because I didn’t understand their terms of development language.

Later, after several incidents thought to start with development and dive deep into it, So that I could be a full-stack developer. I started to learn Java and started Android development. But later I understood that it was not my cup of tea. With confused thoughts and with compelling thoughts to learn development, I started to search the options to learn development. Weeks after that, I’ve got an opportunity to attend a mobile app development workshop using Flutter organized by DSC SASTRA Deemed to be University.

Cross-platform development (Source: Google photos)

Flutter is an open-source SDK for creating high-performance, high-fidelity mobile apps for iOS and Android. The Flutter framework makes it easy for you to build user interfaces that react smoothly in your app, while reducing the amount of code required to synchronize and update your app’s view.

Flutter makes it easy to get started building beautiful apps, with its rich set of Material Design and Cupertino (iOS) widgets and behaviors. Your users will love your app’s natural look and feel, because Flutter implements platform-specific scrolling, navigational patterns, fonts, and more. You’ll feel powerful and productive with Flutter’s functional-reactive framework and our extremely fast hot reloads on devices and emulators.

Flutter app development (Source: Google photos)

I was very new to app development and was eagerly attending furthermore workshops on the upcoming days. Slowly started to understand how the process of app development works. I started to learn Flutter from the workshops organized in my university by seniors. then switched on to YouTube and tried to code along with them. This was my starting point towards Flutter. Then tried to study the documentaion and statrted to code and resolved errors by analysing the code myself.

Also, I found many more interesting features in Flutter which helped me a lot during the phase of learning and development.

• Single codebase: Flutter needs only a single codebase to work upon and can you can release your apps to iOS, Android, and Web without coding individually for different platforms.
• Hot Reload Button: The changes made by the developers can be seen instantaneously with Hot Reload. This feature is super-handy for developers as it makes the changes visible in the app itself. As the changes made are visible within seconds, developers can fix the bugs in no time.
• Minimal code: Flutter is developed using the Dart programming language. Dart uses JIT and AOT compilation that helps improve the overall startup time, functioning and accelerates the performance. JIT enhances the development system with the hot reload function. It refreshes the UI without putting in the effort to building a new one.
• Accessible Native Features and SDKs: My app development process gets easy and delightful through Flutter’s native codes, third-party integrations, and platform APIs. Therefore, I can easily access the native features and SDKs on both Android and iOS platforms and reuse the widely-used programming languages such as Kotlin and Swift.

Cross-platform mobile app development (Source: Google photos)

Also I found many forums and documentation stuffs for Flutter. There are many more developers learning Flutter and using it to develop their projects. I found many forums useful to clarify my queries. Some of them are Flutter Documentation, Stack Overflow, and Github. There are a lot of fellow developers out there to help you out in every stage of your learning. These are some of the platforms I’ve visited and there are many more forms out there to collaborate.

Now, I am happy using Flutter to build my apps and still learning to add cooler stuffs to my application. I have also built an app, a Corona Virus Tracker application with the complete database of the Corona Virus cases and a merchandise app to handle our activities of our startup.

Here are the links of my project’s Github repo:
Coronavirus tracker application
Merchandise app

Thanks to team Flutter to make it happen! Cheers to learning!