Flutter Force Weekly
Your hub for all things Flutter! Discover codes, repos, libraries, projects, and articles. Let's build amazing apps together!
Welcome to this week's newsletter! We've got plenty of exciting updates and insights to share. Dive into the latest tips, tricks, and resources for Flutter development, keeping you up-to-date with the freshest content in the community. Whether you're looking to enhance your skills, explore new libraries, or stay informed about the latest trends, this edition has something for everyone. Let's continue building amazing apps together! 🚀
Articles
Automate Flutter Deployments to App Store and Play Store using Fastlane and Github Actions for a lazy developer
I find streamlining the release of Flutter apps to App Store / Play Store / testers to be a pain. There are so many moving parts and so much configuration. And the documentation is not always the best. Even though I have done it a few times - and can copy from older projects - I still find myself googling the same things over and over again.
I find that despite there being a lot of tutorials on setting up CI/CD for Flutter apps, most of them are either outdated, too complicated, containg errors or are just not very clear.
I wrote this article to provide a no-nonsense guide to setting up automatic release of your Flutter app using GitHub Actions and locally, using Fastlane, in the simplest and fastest way possible.
Enhancing Your Flutter Project with Typesafe Packages
Flutter's popularity has surged thanks to its ability to build beautiful and performant cross-platform applications. Large projects with many teams and developers often face a lot errors on a smaller or a larger scale due to the size of the project.
One of those problems is type safety. What is typesafe code?
How to structure your Flutter projects
When creating a new flutter project, you might find yourself confused with how you are supposed to organize your app architecture and to figure out where certain pieces of code should go.
If you have been following a lot of tutorials to learn Flutter, you’ll quickly realize that they all have very messy ways of organizing their code to quickly develop their code and teach you the topic at hand.
Now in most cases this is fine, but say you are building a large scale project or trying to convert an already existing one; You don’t want to end up putting all of your code in the /lib directory! And by wasting too much time figuring this out, you’ll slow yourself down on development and confuse yourself on where everything goes.
Firestore and NoSQL — The challenges of structuring our data
For quite some time, developers have used Firebase tools to help them build apps faster, from push notifications and authentication to Firestore’s database. At this year’s Google I/O, it was announced that Firestore now supports SQL with Data Connect, allowing developers to choose between NoSQL and SQL.
Understanding and Addressing the Grey Screen in Flutter
Imagine installing an app, going through it, and somewhere along the line you see this beautiful grey screen that blocks the entire view of your device. Or, as a developer, you send an app to a client or tester and while going through it, they report a grey screen that is not part of the app flow. This article explains how to handle any error that intends to disrupt the flow of your app and provide a better overall experience for your mobile app.
Packages
Pub Manager
Pub Manager is a Visual Studio Code extension that helps you manage packages in your Dart and Flutter projects. With this extension, you can view package information, check for updates, and easily update your pubspec.yaml file.
SmartTextField
SmartTextField is a TextInput that aims to extract valuable information seamlessly from raw text, making it easier to collect various types of data without breaking the user flow. 🚀
Heart
Extension methods for strings and lists, inspired by Haskell.
disclosure
Simplify building custom UIs with accessible controls for showing and hiding content, like accordion panels.
Figmage
Figmage is a magical CLI tool that helps you generate a flutter package from your Figma Design System. It uses the Figma APIs to fetch your design tokens from published styles, as well as variables, with full modes support.
use_optimistic
An easy-to-use hook to optimistically update generic state and then resolve it later (async or sync) by accept, acceptAs, or reject-ing.
Flutter Gemma
Gemma is a family of lightweight, state-of-the art open models built from the same research and technology used to create the Gemini models
Videos
Tween (Technique of the Week)
Tween classes are useful when you want to interpolate over a range of values to create an animation.