This week in Flutter #40: A Flutter event for Windows developers and the biggest Flutter conference.

5 February 2022 — Newsletter

This week there was the “Flutter for Windows developers” event. Honestly, not much was announced during the event. The feature that allows creating Windows apps with Flutter was already there. It is now stable enough to be announced. Another version of Dart and Flutter has been released, read more about the Dart release and the Flutter release from the official articles. You can also watch some videos about the new Flutter version, I suggest you watch this one by Filip Hráček.

I got some Error: Member not found: 'packageRoot' errors to fix because of the new Dart version. I fixed them by upgrading my Flutter dependencies.

Flutter Vikings day 1 🎦 and day 2 🎦 are available on YouTube. I only followed the former for now, but I plan to watch the rest this weekend.

One of my favorite talks from the first day is Use OpenAPI in Flutter, where Guillaume Bernos shows how to generate Dart networking code from an OpenAPI (or Swagger) document. I did the exact same thing a the beginning of this week. Watching the talk first would have saved me some time.

Another talk I like is BDD In Flutter by Oleksandr Leushchenko where he applies BDD to Flutter, using useful packages. That seems too good to be true, so I will need to research it a bit more on my own.

What do you think? Let me know in the comment section below.

- Michele Volpato

Development 🧑‍💻

🔗 10 Beginners mistakes in Flutter (and how to avoid them)

Guillaume Bernos gives you a list of beginner mistakes that are common when programming with Flutter. They are beginner mistakes, but not only beginners make them.

🔗 Cat and Mice – Part 7: Releasing the App

Sooner or later Bart van Wezel’s game had to reach the time to be distributed. But first, a splash screen must be added, and screenshots must be made. I especially liked the “automated screenshots” part of the article. Something I still need to implement in the apps I work on.

🔗 Flutter — Native communication with Pigeon

pigeon is a package that can be used during development to generate code that allows you to communicate between your Flutter app and the platform your app is running on. In this article, Tony Owen shows you how to use it in your app.

🔗 How to hide app preview when switching apps, with Flutter

I never had to hide the preview of my Flutter apps while the device is switching between apps. One way to do it is by using this method by Carlo Loguercio, and changing directly the native code.

🔗 Synchronize the scrolling of your ListViews in Flutter

This is a problem a colleague of mine had in his own app some time ago. He needed to scroll two ListView at the same time. Scrolling one would scroll the other of the same amount in the same direction. I do not remember exactly how we solved it, but the solution was for sure complicated. Yesterday I read this article by Dávid Tengeri, which links to a package by Google.

Backend 🗄

🔗 Serverpod

Serverpod is an open-source app and web server. You can write server-side code, in Dart, and it automatically generates APIs and client-side code for you. It also easily connects to a database. It is not a 1.0 release yet, but the maintainers claim that it is used in production in multiple projects.

Others 🤷‍♂️

🔗 XD to Flutter v4: Better Layout Code

I already covered XD to Flutter in previous issues. I like that designers can work in XD and share Flutter code directly with developers. The plugin is now in version 4, read more about it in this article, by Grant Skinner.

That’s it for this week.

If you want to comment on any of this week’s entries, you can do it in the comment section below.

Have a bug-free week,