Recapitulating Flutter Interact ‘19
Hello, folks! If you’re familiar with Flutter, you probably will have a clue about the recent festival that was celebrated by Flutter community called Flutter Interact. There were some mind-blowing announcements which certainly made sure that Flutter will have a huge role to play in future technology.
Haven’t heard about it yet? No worries, this blog summarises all the exciting announcements discussed in the event.
Let me list down all the interesting stuff discussed in the event:
- Flutter 1.12
- Flutter for Web
- Flutter for Desktop
- Flutter Octopus
- Dart 2.7
- Dart Dev Tools
- DartPad
- Rive
- SuperNova & Adobe XD plugin for Flutter
Flutter 1.12
Being a developer, one always awaits software updates. Flutter released its latest version 1.12 with some breathtaking features.
This new Flutter SDK provides:
Dark-Mode for iOS
- Flutter will now provide full dark mode support in iOS with pixel-perfect UI.
New Cupertino widgets
- Flutter introduced new Cupertino widgets with great support for all the iPhones and iPads.
- Default support for AndroidX in projects- AndroidX is a set of latest libraries and APIs of android which includes Jetpack libraries along with Support libraries. Android module of the newly created Flutter project will now have AndroidX support by default.
Updated Add-to-App support
- Flutter now provides seamless support to add Flutter into existing apps. Android studio will now have an option to add a Flutter module into an existing Android app, eliminating the extra integration process.
Support for Google Fonts
- We can now directly import and use Google Fonts in a Flutter project without adding .ttf assets and declaring them in pubspec.yaml file. Isn’t it great?
- Adding Google fonts dependency into our app will provide us access to thousands of font with autocomplete suggestions.
Flutter Gallery
- Google released an app called Flutter Gallery to explore all the new widgets and demos. It’s a great way to be introduced to a never-ending set of Flutter widgets and to play around with those. Here’s a link if you want to try it out.
A lot of huge brands are migrating to flutter including Alibaba, Phillips, eBay, and Groupon. Recently, Google used Flutter to develop its Stadia app, which is basically an online gaming platform.
Flutter for Web
Finally, the web version of Flutter is in Beta (Yay!!). Now, it can be considered good enough to use in production.
The key point about Flutter Web is that the code is compiled down to optimized JS and uses native components that are used by the websites developed using HTML, CSS. This helps Flutter developer to build websites having performance as good as that of the ones developed using native tools.
Flutter for Web has the following advantages :
- The same codebase used for mobile app can be used for website
- Compilation to optimized JS
- Support for native browser controls
- Debugger integration and more
Flutter for Desktop
The desktop version for Flutter is now in Alpha for Mac OS. (It’s Christmas already! :D).
- The desktop version now has the support for user interactions like mouse clicks, keyboard inputs.
- Responsive design and components can now be achieved in Desktop.
One thing I would like to mention before I move on to Dart updates is Flutter Octopus. Flutter now has capabilities to debug multiple connected devices simultaneously. Flutter team showcased debugging a system connected with various devices. Jaw-dropping! Isn’t it? :D
Dart 2.7
Dart language, the sole of Flutter, also received an update that includes the most awaited feature: Extension functions.
Dart 2.7 also introduces null safety, a very important remedy for NPE. Other announcements for dart include characters package to handle strings with special characters.
Tools/IDE updates
DartPad
- DartPad is a tool that allows you to play with Dart in any modern browser. It now has the support of running and executing Flutter code right on the browser without installing any Flutter SDK on your machine and with all the UI interactions. This is heaven, my friend!
Here’s a link for you to explore it.
Hot UI
- Hot UI is a tool for previewing UI in the IDEs. It allows us to make changes there itself and the changes can be reflected on the actual device using the magic of Hot Reload.
Dart Dev Tools
- Dart Dev Tools is a suite to debugging flutter/dart apps. It now is capable to preview the UI and suggest changes right in the preview to fix if there are any issues such as UI overflow, for instance.
Supernova & Adobe plugin for Flutter
- They both have pretty much similar use cases. Both of them are used to convert UI from Sketch/XD files directly into Flutter code.
Rive (previously 2Dimensions)
- Rive can import Lottie files created with Adobe After Effects and can produce Rive objects. These Rive objects can be used in Flutter app to create mesmerizing user interfaces and animations.
These are pretty much all the major announcements of the event. I can still go on and on for another hour describing how good and successful the Flutter Interact event was but I don’t want to increase the length of this article then it already is. :D
My love for flutter has increased exponentially after knowing such brilliant stuff. If you’re a flutter beginner and still searching for a push to get started, here’s something I would like to share.
Embedded compilers! Yes. Flutter.dev now has embedded compilers in the documentation for deeper and visual knowledge of the concepts.
Still not impressed? Ok, let’s look at one last thing.
Fuchsia!
Fuchsia is basically a modular OS, being developed by Google, which will support various platforms including AR, VR, frontend, backend and more…
A fuchsia module in the Flutter project was noted in one of the sessions. Google is surely working on introducing Fuschia in Flutter. Flutter is the Future!
That’s all for now. Thank you for your time!
