Forem: Cronative Technologies

Why has Flutter become the best choice to develop a mobile app in 2022–23

Cronative Technologies — Wed, 07 Dec 2022 08:52:50 +0000

Flutter is the best way to build a mobile app MVP in a short time for both Android and iOS using a single codebase.

Thus, if you are a startup with a tight budget, flutter is an ideal option to develop mobile apps.

Benefits of choosing Flutter for mobile app development.

The faster app development process
Less coding
Design custom UI
Reduce mobile app development cost
Highly reactive framework
Accessible native features & SDKs
Perfect for MVP
Plugins are easy to avail
Needs less testing
Provides faster deployment

Top 5 Flutter Animation Packages

Cronative Technologies — Fri, 24 Sep 2021 07:02:53 +0000

Flutter Apps built using Flutter animation libraries are drawing the highest attention and are in the hot debates nowadays.

Animations are a must in an app. Why? Because it is no longer a decorating element but a functional element of an app. It shows the journey of users from one tab to another and exemplifies the usability, utility, and desirability of the application. Animation in Flutter application is like the icing on the cake. Flutter itself is famous for developing cross-platform applications for web and desktop, and animation packages will just make it more complete.
Now, we will explore the animation libraries which you can use in your Flutter application. Have a look…

Animations:

This package was published on Feb’18,2020, by Flutter.dev is gaining all eyes in the Flutter community. It allows you to customize animations based on your content and provides some pre-canned animations with delightful effects. It simplest the animation process allowing developers to include implicit-like and explicit-like animation.

You can install this animation package from the command line with Flutter,

$ flutter pub get
Or, you can import the same in your Dart code using,
$import 'package:animations/animations.dart';

Flutter_Staggered_animations :

Flutter staggered animations was released on 4th September 2019 by mobiten.com. It allows you to add staggered animations to the ListView, GridView, Column, and Row children. To install this animation package, add this package as a dependency in the pubspec.yaml file by typing,
dependencies:
flutter_staggered_animations: "^0.1.2"
Or, you can import the package in the code file by typing,
import
'package:flutter_staggered_animations/flutter_staggered_animations.dart';

Simple Animations:

Imagine creating beautiful custom animations in a jiffy!! Simple Animations released on 31st March 2019, by Felix-blaschke.de simplifies this task of creating animations in Flutter applications. It is a fully tested, well documented, and enterprise-ready animation package allowing the developers to create custom animations in stateless widgets. The handful of information covered in the document will drive towards the animation itself, and you would love to create one all by yourself.
You can animate multiple properties on the go and create staggered animations within seconds. Simple Animations is designed keeping type safety in mind, and you can add the dependency by typing,

import ‘package:simple_animations/simple_animations.dart’;
You can install the package by typing the following in the command line,
$ flutter pub get

Loading animations:

Another great animation library was released on 9th September 2019. Loading animation is again a simple but highly customizable set of loading animation which you can use for flutter app development company. You can find the official link by clicking here. For installation of this animation package, type, the following in the pubspec.yaml file.

loading_animations: "^2.1.0"
Further, import this file in your project,
import 'package:loading_animations/loading_animations.dart';

Lottie:

A great Flutter package that provides a native feel on Android, as well as iOS, is Lottie. It is a mobile library for Android and iOS, which breaks down the Adobe After Effects animation. The library functions effectively on Android, iOS, and macOS. The only shortcoming of this library is that it is relatively new; hence, it doesn’t provide extensive documentation or efficient performance.

Awesome Flutter Animation

Cronative Technologies — Fri, 24 Sep 2021 06:51:35 +0000

To make an app’s UI alive, we use animations which is a complex procedure.

Ways of Animation Implementation

There are two different ways of implementing animations you can use when creating animations in Flutter.
Implicit animations
Explicit animations

Implicit Animations

This type of animation can be created via using a widget that is provided by Flutter core. You can modify a widget property by setting a target value; whenever that target value changes, the widget animates the property from the old value to the new one.

For example, we use AnimatedAlign widget to make a widget change its position based on alignment property or AnimatedContainer to animate a Container’s change of property such as decoration, height, width.

Explicit Animations

Explicit animations are a set of controls for telling Flutter how to rapidly rebuild the widget tree while changing widget properties to create animation effects.

The animation property is controlled via an AnimationController. It is often coupled with the AnimatedBuilder widget to animate any of its children widgets.

Built-in widget
AnimatedAlign
AnimatedContainer
AnimatedCrossFade
AnimatedDefaultTextStyle
AnimatedListState
AnimatedOpacity
AnimatedPhysicalModel
AnimatedPositioned
AnimatedModalBarrier
AnimatedSize
DecoratedBoxTransition
FadeTransition
PositionedTransition
RotationTransition
ScaleTransition
SizeTransition
SlideTransition
AnimatedBuilder
AnimatedWidget

What Future Holds for Mobile App Development

Cronative Technologies — Fri, 24 Sep 2021 06:34:14 +0000

Mobile app development is one such industry everyone wants a piece of the pie for themselves. Its innumerable growth in the past decade is proof that how profitable it is. But will it continue to be a profitable business in the future? What future holds for mobile app development? Stay tuned to find out.

Currently, there are over 2.1 million apps for iOS and 2.8 million apps for android devices. And by the end of 2025 more than 70% of the earth population will have mobile devices. This means there will be billions of mobiles and millions of apps for us to use.

New startups are emerging with new concepts, developers are developing tools to efficiently develop mobile applications, IoT app development, AR/VR app development, and many more things are going on. With this blog, we want to convey the significance mobile app development has for businesses and what new entrepreneurs can expect from the future. The following are the few future trends everyone should watch out for.

1. Mobile App Development Based on Cloud Model

Cloud-based application development is taking a toll on other app development models as it is becoming more and more feasibly possible to develop apps for big data with cloud. Scalability and unlimited space are among the top factors that favor the trend of developing cloud-based applications.

Also, cloud integration offers lower equipment costs, streamlined processes, improved productivity, enhanced collaboration, reduced hosting cost, and other benefits for mobile app development. Hybrid cloud development and Quantum computing are the future of cloud-based mobile app development.

2. AI-Powered Smart Apps Development

Do you love sci-fi movies? As a child, you must have watched many sci-fi movies and wondered can it happen in the real world? Well, AI has that power. It can redefine the landscape of mobile app development. Moreover, it can turn everything sci-fi movies shows into reality when it is combined with futuristic technology like IoT.

3. Next-Generation User Experience with AR/VR

All our bets are on Augmented and virtual reality as both are vital futuristic tech for the future of mobile app development. We have seen the craze of the Pokémon Go app which provided an integrated ecosystem to find various Pokémon like creatures through the screen of the camera.

4. Instant Apps is a Big Opportunity

Instant apps are real things, which allow you to run and test an app without even downloading it. This presents a big opportunity for users as well as developers because it eliminates the requirement of installing an app. It can work as a website and an app to provide similar functionality and experience of both.

5. IoT is Opening New Possibilities

The concept of a smart home is transforming how we are living with devices based on the futuristic tech like IoT. The IoT means a network of devices connected over the internet. It can control your alarm clocks to coffee machines to smart lights and other smart devices connected over the internet. And what you have to do is just tap on your mobile device app to turn them on, off, or anything else. Interesting right? IoT will make all this possible to ease your life and improve your lifestyle.

6. 5G Will Transform the Wireless Technology

5G is much anticipated wireless technology which will transform the landscape of mobile app development. Because 5G is bringing unthinkable speed, which will be 100 times more than what 4G is capable of delivering. And it holds keys to living luxuriously in the future. The image below shows what 5G wireless tech is capable of.

7. Mobile Apps for Wearable

The wearables are becoming a necessity just like mobile devices. It is at a stage, where mobile devices were a decade ago. As the Statista’s report, wearable has 441.5 million user base in 2020, which is a whopping 26.1% year-on-year rise. Whether it’s a smartwatch, fitness band, or spectacles, they have got a huge market base.

Conclusion

As we are progressing, the mobile app development industry is also advancing with time. These are the major technological aspect that will surely make the mobile app development more and more revolutionary. And with time new technologies will come to light to unlock the new possibilities and develop remarkable applications.

What’s new in Flutter 2.5

Cronative Technologies — Thu, 23 Sep 2021 11:29:28 +0000

The initial release of Flutter in 2017 spelled the beginning of a new era in the hybrid development of cross-platform apps released by Google.

Flutter took the world by storm and, within a few years, countless companies and developers adopted Flutter as their platform and framework of choice for developing cross-platform applications. Because Flutter enables you to develop mobile (Android and iOS), desktop, and, as of the release of Flutter 2.0, even web apps without changing their codebase or rewriting the apps from scratch.

The latest release of this rapidly evolving framework, Flutter 2.5, packs a whole new, even more, powerful punch. Flutter 2.5 was announced as stable on September 8. Installation instructions can be found at flutter. dev. Also in Flutter 2.5:

Performance Improvements
Android full-screen support
Apple Silicon support
Dart formatter and cascades
Pub support for ignoring files using.pubignore
The pub is much smarter and faster
ListView now sends notifications of scrollable areas even if the user isn’t scrolling
Flutter DevTools utilizes these events to assist you with diagnosing shader compilation jank in your application Material banner supports now to the ScaffoldMessenger
New CPU Profiler highlight that empowers you to hide profiler data from any of these sources.
This release of DevTools accompanies an update to the Widget Inspector that permits you to hover over a widget to assess the object, view properties, widget state, etc.
To make DevTools a more useful destination for comprehension and debugging your Flutter applications.
We can add dependencies without leave the VS Code now The Visual Studio Code test runner also adds new gutter icons showing the last state of a test that can be clicked to run the test.

How to upgrade to Flutter 2.5

You can upgrade your Flutter version to v2.5 by running the following command:

flutter upgrade

The Flutter CLI tool will do its work to upgrade your Flutter SDK to the latest version 2.5.
To verify that the upgrade is successful, run the following command:

flutter --version

Flutter 2.5.0 • channel stable • https://github.com/flutter/flutter.git
Framework • revision 4cc385b4b8 (5 days ago) • 2021-09-23 23:01:49 -0700
Engine • revision f0826da7ef
Tools • Dart 2.14.0

New SwiftUI Features for the next step of iOS development

Cronative Technologies — Thu, 23 Sep 2021 11:00:47 +0000

New SwiftUI Features for the next step iOS development:

1. Runs on Apple’s Latest OS

Before getting into the features of SwiftUI, the first thing to know is SwiftUI is not compatible with former versions of Apple’s operating system. It only supports iOS 13, the iOS 13 is just in Xcode 11, and Xcode 11 is not released yet so we have to install Xcode 11 Beta for now. It means you cannot use SwiftUI if your application requires to support of iOS version 12 or its previous versions.

2. No Auto Layout

Auto Layout has been the preferred way of layouts declaration on Apple platforms as it encourages developers to keep some assumptions about the container’s actual dimensions and it makes UIs more flexible. However, SwiftUI replaces Auto Layout with layout constructs – one level higher. It works similar to how the layout has been handled in WatchOS.

3. Doesn’t support Storyboard

SwiftUI also replaces storyboards with code; thereby it becomes easy to make a reusable view. Developers often get code conflict problems when using storyboards in the development team. SwiftUI avoids the issue and empowers developers to freely decide whether they like to work visually or directly in code while making the code the “single source of truth”.

4. Dark Mode

Similarly, SwiftUI has changed the typical bright theme into a darker mode that can be easily visible particularly at night. Some users think a brighter theme looks better. It did nothing but enabled developers to add a dark theme to their apps if they are not comfortable with the brighter ones.

5. Empowers systems to do their tasks

With SwiftUI, your app can automatically translate its view into a visual interface element suitable for the given platform.

For example, the Toggle view can render differently and correctly on macOS, iOS, watchOS, and tvOS. Moreover, SwiftUI can adjust the colors, padding, and spacing based on the platform, container size on the control state and the current screen. Paragraph text padding, for example, appears in one way on iOS and inclines more border space on the iPad’s screen.

As such, with iOS, you are not only writing less code but also leaving everything to the system to do its tasks and results in only a few bugs as well.

6. Cross-platform User Interface

SwiftUI does not stop there it also serving as a cross-platform user interface layer, which functions across tvOS, macOS, iOS and watchOS. It is easier to use the same code across all platforms. To a certain extent, you no need to take your business logic, API code, and Models from platform to platform and you can also use most of your UI elements across all platforms. Hence, now it is enough to learn one layout framework and one language and can deploy the code anywhere.

7. View Composition

The main concept that was repeated in the SwiftUI sessions at WWDC is its views. Views in SwiftUI are extremely lightweight and it includes zero performance penalties while creating them. Unlike UIViews, most SwiftUI views are available as a Swift struct and can be created, referenced and passed as value parameters. The use of Swift struct eliminates the excess of memory allocations and the development of several subclasses & dynamic messages - the shortcomings of passing UIkit based UIViews.

Further, the modifiers and parameters on a nested SwiftUI view can be composited together as a single entity at the time of display and layout cycles. Besides, the nodes present in the view tree are tracked for state changes and if there is no change, no need to be rendered.

All these convey that in SwiftUI, it is a distinct advantage to build many special-purpose views based on your app requirement. Here is a code sample for view composition:

In the above code, a MultiLineText view would be used throughout an app.

8. Simplifies adding animations

With SwiftUI, creating animations becomes as simple as adding a single method call. It can calculate and animate transitions automatically when required.

9. Live Preview
When you use SwiftUI in Xcode, you can design, build as well as test your application interface even without running your app.

I Design tools of Xcode 11 allow drag & drop UI building with SwiftUI. The changes you made in the UI are visible in the preview screen. Finally, Xcode recompiles your changes and sets them into a working version of your app.

Semantic Colors SwiftUI provides standard colors like green, blue and red. However, those are not the pure colors as like from UIColor. The colors can automatically adapt to dark and light mode – they will appear darker or brighter based on the system appearance.

Right now, the vast majority of iOS applications are developed using UIKit. Industry experts expect the iOS community will migrate over to SwiftUI at any kind of rapid pace. There are still many other features from SwiftUI that must be explored.

Top 7 Flutter Tools that you should know

Cronative Technologies — Tue, 14 Sep 2021 02:36:18 +0000

There's a massive pool of Flutter development tools and it’s gonna get bigger. We have listed the best Flutter development tools that can make a difference.

Panache:

Panache is one of the most popular Flutter tools in recent years. It’s used by over 40 million developers worldwide. Panache enables you to create customized material themes for your Flutter apps. You can customize widgets, colors, shapes, and everything about your theme.

Using Panache is very easy to understand. Go to the Panache Website to customize your app theme, download theme.dart file, and add the theme to your flutter project. That’s all!

Adobe XD Plugins:

As you know, Adobe XD is a design tool for web apps and mobile apps. Adobe XD is the easiest way to design UI and UX. You create the design, and Adobe exports the code for you.

The good news is that Adobe XD supports Flutter from early 2020. That means you can design your application with Adobe XD and it generates the dart code for you.

Github Repo

Firebase:

Firebase is a highly used backend platform that’s developed by Google. With Firebase, you can power your app’s backend, including data storage, user authentication, real-time database, static hosting, cloud messaging, push notifications, and much more.

If you are new to Flutter, we highly recommend the Firebase platform because there are many documentation articles and a thousand example projects on Github. To start using Firebase, you can take a glance at this Google CodeLabs.

Official website

Codemagic:

Codemagic is one of the most efficient ways to boost your Flutter app development process. It helps in automatic code signing, allowing smooth development and deployment of flutter applications. Also, with Codemagic, you can test and release your flutter apps with no configuration. It can automate the whole build process, test, and release process of your flutter apps. Using Codemagic is surprisingly not too hard.

Official website

Square:

If you are interested in e-commerce or anything you can sell in your app, you shouldn’t miss the Square tool. Square is an in-app payment management platform. It offers better assistance in taking care of any sort of payment processing technicality for you with an in-app payment feature.

Using its Flutter SDK, you can start receiving in-app payments effortlessly via an easily customizable user interface with built-in support for storing cards and online wallets.

Github repo

WonderPush:

WonderPush is a push notification and in-app messaging implementation that you can utilize in your Flutter app to boost your users’ engagement. It provides a plethora of powerful features, including segmentation and targeting, geo-targeting, and A/B testing for a meager price.

Official website

Appetize:

Appetize is an online web-based android Emulator and iOS simulator for when you want to run native apps in the browser. It is handy for customer support, training, development, testing, and app demos. You can utilize it to make the introduction procedure more effective.

It’s easy to upload your application to Appetize cloud, but you can use it via API. To start using Appetize, you can check out this article.