Forem: Michele Volpato

This week in Flutter #44

Michele Volpato — Mon, 07 Mar 2022 07:59:57 +0000

I have been reading quite some articles about testing in Flutter lately. Dhruv Nakum and Guillaume Bernos are writing about it in this issue.
Testing is an often overlooked part of programming: if only we tested more, many bugs would not even reach production.

I do not believe in 100% code coverage: it gives you a false sense of security, and getting from 90% to 100% might not be the best way to allocate your time or budget.
Even so, I must say I do not spend as much time as I would want on designing and writing tests. I hope these readings will help me improve my testing skills.

I wonder when we will move from automating tests to automating the writing of those tests.

Do you reach 100% code coverage in all your Flutter projects?
Let me know in the comment section.

- Michele Volpato

Development 🧑‍💻

🔗 Flutter, add an undo feature

When I first read the title of this article, I thought it was about adding a ctrl+z feature to a Flutter app.
It is not. It's about giving the possibility to your users to stop an action they performed in your
app before it's too late. For instance, canceling a message they just sent. Pierre Monier also gives you a solution for when the app gets killed while the message is in this cancelable limbo.

🔗 Testing In Flutter

Dhruv Nakum published a series of articles on testing in Flutter. There is an article about unit testing, one about widget testing, and, finally, one
about integration testing. They are
good getting-started articles if you are starting your testing journey just now.

[...]

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This week in Flutter #43

Michele Volpato — Sun, 27 Feb 2022 14:24:25 +0000

The results from the latest quarterly Flutter survey are out. They focused on:

Null safety, which is, as predicted, makes the majority of developers happy;
Ecosystem, which satisfactory rate is increasing;
Text editing, a subject the Flutter team is planning to improve, both in code and with examples;
Mobile development.

I am not surprised to see that Xcode (for iOS dev) and Gradle (for Android dev) are problematic to deal with.
That is also what I experienced while working with Flutter.

What is stopping you from using Flutter more effectively?
Let me know in the comment section.

- Michele Volpato

Development 🧑‍💻

🔗 Cleaner Flutter Vol. 9: Injecting dependencies

A nice explanation of dependency injection in Flutter by Marcos Sevilla,
with some code examples, and more detailed information about when using flutter_bloc and Riverpod. Followed
by Cleaner Flutter Vol. 10: State and UI which is a very
nice reading about state management. I suggest you have a look at the entire "Cleaner Flutter" series.

Tools 🛠

🔗 How to distribute Flutter Desktop app binaries using GitHub Actions

In this article, Angelo Cassano describes the steps he took to create
executables for macOS, Windows, and Linux using GitHub Actions for
his MacRecoveryX Flutter app.

🔗 VSCode Shortcuts, Extensions & Settings for Flutter Development

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This week inFlutter #42

Michele Volpato — Sun, 20 Feb 2022 15:34:09 +0000

This week I have been busy integrating GitLab's code quality features in the Flutter projects I am working on. We do not use CodeClimate, and it does not seem to support Dart anyway, so I had to look into other solutions.

Dart Code Metrics analyzes and reports your code quality. You can set the report to be in a format that GitLab understands. So I added the package as a development dependency and I created a GitLab CI job for it. Now we get the report directly in the merge request UI. Useful as a pre code review step.

The only problem I have is that there is not a 1 to 1 map between the rules in this package and the static analysis tool Dart is shipped with. Dart Code Metrics is maintained by Dmitry Zhifarsky and others.

Do you have any suggestions from your experience with this package?
Let me know in the comment section.

- Michele Volpato

Development 🧑‍💻

🔗 Networking In Flutter: 🔥Interceptors🔥

This week, Dhruv Nakum explains how to add interceptors to your Flutter networking code, using the Dio package. Interceptors are useful when you need to perform some action to all networking calls your app makes. For instance a specific header.

🔗 Send APK automatically to Telegram using Dart/Flutter

I use Firebase Distribution to reach testers and users outside of my team for builds that we do not want to distribute using Android Beta or Apple TestFlight.
Giovani Albuquerque, instead, uses a Dart program he wrote that distribute an app via Telegram. That is an interesting approach.

🔗 Pragmatic State Handling in Flutter

Sometimes we are so busy using state management packages that we forget that Flutter has already everything we need to handle state. This article, by Erlend, reminds you exactly this. You don't have to avoid external packages entirely, but read the article and see how simple it can be. If I could add anything to it, it would be the usage of InheritedWidget instead of a global variable.

🔗 The Grammar of Graphics in Flutter Charts

Graphic is a flutter package that implements Leland Wilkinson's book The Grammar of Graphics, which defines data visualization in terms of scales and layers. In this tutorial, LIN Chen shows us how to use it.

[...]

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This week in Flutter #41

Michele Volpato — Sun, 13 Feb 2022 14:41:49 +0000

More on the biggest Flutter conference and a new Flutter State Management course.

This week I watched the second day of Flutter Vikings.
My favorite talk is Full Stack Dart byChris Swan. There is a lot
of information and many articles about Flutter online, but there is less content about Dart. Especially
server-side Dart, so this talk was a nice change of pace.

If you plan on using Flutter in the future, an article you should read isFlutter in 2022: strategy and roadmapby Flutter product manager Tim Sneath. You’ll find a link to the
Flutter 2022 strategy document.

This week there is also an update on Vandad Nahavandipoor’s video series on Flutter:
there is a new playlist about Flutter State Management. Thank you Vandad for sharing these videos for free.

Have you watched both the Flutter Vikings sessions? Which talks were your favorite?

- Michele Volpato

Development 🧑‍💻

🔗 Create a real-time chat with pure Flutter and Dart)

Felix Blaschke created the shelf_plus package to improve
your server-side Dart life. It has quite a lot of extra features, you should go have a look if you
have a Dart server-side project. He talks about it in this article.

🔗 Flutter Testing— Understand Unit, Widget, and Integration Testing

Testing is important to ensure the quality of your code. In this article, Aditya Rohmanexplains what type of tests you can perform in your Flutter app.

🔗 Drawing and rotating arcs in Flutter

Bart van Wezel takes a break from his Cat and Mice game to teach you
about arcs and how to rotate them. He does not use any package, which is way cooler if you ask me.

🔗 Flutter: How to dramatically decrease reads from Firestore using Local Storage

This is the kind of article I wanted to read for a long time. In my team, we use Firestore in more than one
project, and some of them are starting to push our billing amount at the end of the month. In this article,Tarun Thummala explains how they usedDrift to cache chat messages in their app.

🔗 Flutter App Architecture: The Domain Model

To avoid writing all your code in one class, you can separate your code into layers.Andrea Bizzotto uses Domain-Driven Design and explains to you
what the domain layer is and how to implement models, and test them, in Dart.

🔗 Dart: How to Handle Exceptions Raised Inside Isolates

This is a cool article. If you use isolates in Dart you might miss exceptions raised inside them.
You can use Completer to prevent that, as explained by Dmytro Gladkyi.

Others 🤷‍♂️

🔗 Review of MacBook Pro M1 Max 64Go from a Flutter Developer

My late 2016 Macbook pro is starting to feel dated. For this reason, I am in the market for a new machine.
One option is a Linux-based desktop. Another option is a new Mac. All reviews I can find online discuss how good
it is for content creators, not so many of them are about programming with it.Guillaume Bernos shows some Flutter-related simple benchmarks.

In the article Go stands for Gigaoctets, the French for Gigabytes.

🔗 ALL THE DASH MERCH: Building the DashShop | Learning to Fly 🎦

This is an interesting episode of Learning to Fly. Khanh Nguyen is working
on the DashShop app, where you can buy Dash merchandise. With some help from Andrew Fitz Gibbon.

That’s it for this week.

Have a bug-free week,

- Michele Volpato

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This week in Flutter #40

Michele Volpato — Sun, 06 Feb 2022 14:35:37 +0000

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.

- 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

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This week in Flutter #39

Michele Volpato — Sun, 30 Jan 2022 10:10:54 +0000

There is a new Flutter event next week, apparently tailored to
Windows developers. This could mean two things:

new developer tools that run on Windows;
Flutter for Windows getting out of beta.

I am going to bet on the latter. Flutter grew a lot in the last couple of years. Having the possibility
to release a version of our apps to Windows users is a big win for my team. I also wonder if Flutter for Ubuntu
is also getting out of beta and if there is even a more general Flutter for Linux on the horizon. Given
that you create snaps, you should be able already to distribute them on other
Linux distributions.

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

- Michele Volpato

Development 🧑‍💻

🔗 The dark side of Flutter: 4 inconveniences that every Flutter developer should know

Flutter is not perfect, we know that. David Serrano Canales explains some aspects
of Flutter that every company should consider when choosing whether to use it for their customer-facing applications.
All of them are valid points, but I must say that I use plenty of native apps, and I still complain about their size.
Adding 5MB to a 140MB app does not look like an issue to me.

🔗 Functional Error Handling in Flutter

Mario Pepe shares how he uses functional programming to handle errors in his Flutter apps.
He claims that some elements of functional programming can be beneficial in state-based applications. I would say that all
software can benefit from functional programming. Go read the article and find out why.

🔗 Publishing Flutter Windows apps to Microsoft Partner Center

Next week the Flutter team should announce some updates specifically for Windows developers.
You should get ready by reading this article by the Codemagic team, in case you never published a Windows app before.

🔗 Drawing Bezier curves and Splines with CustomPaint flutter

What a nice article Jahswill Essien came up with, explaining Bezier curves, and
providing Flutter code to draw them in your own app. Careful, there is math inside!

🔗 Creating Custom Gestures in Flutter

Is your app so niche that you need custom gestures for it? Read how Alejandro Ulate Fallas
uses advanced techniques in Flutter to get non-standard gestures in a lock-picking app.

[...]

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This week in Flutter #38

Michele Volpato — Sun, 23 Jan 2022 18:36:12 +0000

This week Vandad Nahavandipoor released
35 hours of coding videos
on YouTube. If you want to learn some specific topics from creating developer accounts to coding an entire
Flutter app that connects to Firebase, to submitting it to the stores, you can jump directly to the
correct video in the playlist and watch it.

It is more a 35 hours long "follow along" coding session, rather than a course, but you can learn so much
from it. Thank you Vandad for sharing it for free!

He decided to keep it free because he knows what it means not to be able to afford
a course.

Are you going to watch it? Let me know by leaving a comment.

- Michele Volpato

Development 🧑‍💻

🔗 Cross-Platform file downloads using Flutter

Who would have thought that it is not trivial to download a file in a cross-platform Flutter app? If your app is both mobile
and web, you might end up in the same situation Marcos Carlomagno was in. Follow this article
to learn how he solved the problem.

🔗 How to parse fixed-length data and why you should avoid 'String.substring'

String manipulation in Dart can get messy, especially if you have emojis in your strings.
Sander Roest shows you how you can avoid String parsing problems
by fixing the length of the data you are going to parse.

🔗 How to use constructor tear-offs in Dart

How can you exploit the constructor tear-offs introduced in Dart 2.15?
Juan Belieni has a good example where you can improve the readability of your code
by using them in a switch statement.

[...]

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This week in Flutter #37

Michele Volpato — Sun, 16 Jan 2022 14:14:40 +0000

I have been impressed by the Wordle story this week.
Wordle is a word game made by Josh Wardle, that became viral recently. After that, a lot of
clones appeared on the mobile stores, trying to make money from its sudden success.

And they did make money until the AppStore banned them.
It impressed me that people are paying for a game they can have for free.

In case you want to feel the excitement of getting banned from the AppStore, you can create your own
clone of Wordle in Flutter.

- Michele Volpato

Development 🧑‍💻

🔗 Accessibility in Flutter?

Curious to know how adding accessibility features work in Flutter compared to React Native? In this
article, by Tony Owen, you'll learn the basics of accessibility in Flutter
and you'll find out which one is better: React Native or Flutter. Spoiler alert: it's Flutter 😎

🔗 Flutter App Architecture: The Repository Pattern

In this updated article by Andrea Bizzotto, you'll learn how to use the repository
pattern in an example Flutter app that connects to the OpenWeatherMap API.
Andrea provides different ways to use the code he shows, for instance by using several Flutter packages
like get_it, Riverpod,
and flutter_block. Definitely a must-read.

🔗 Flutter Navigator 2.0: Using go_router

I have been waiting for this article for a while.
The previous article about Navigator 2.0 from
Kevin D. Moore was a little bit complicated. This article, on the other hand,
is exquisite. It combines the previous version with the go_route package, and
I am looking forward to proposing these changes to my team.

Backend 🗄

🔗 Everything You Need To Know About Appwrite 0.12

Appwrite released a new version that adds Permission Models, a more performant pagination strategy,
new dashboards, support for more error logging solutions, and more. 🎉

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This week in Flutter #36

Michele Volpato — Sun, 09 Jan 2022 16:58:46 +0000

A couple of years ago, the Flutter team announced the Flutter Clock Challenge.
The goal was to build a clock face UI, using Flutter for the Lenovo Smart Clock. I had already used Flutter
in production for some months, and I decided to give it a try.

I did not win. Looking at the clocks submitted by the others 🎦, it does
not surprise me. Some of them are insanely beautiful. Some others are utterly complicated. It is also clear that there were
teams who worked at the challenge. Working only a couple of hours on it, in some spare time, was not enough for me.

This week the Flutter team announced another challenge:
the Flutter Puzzle Hack.
I am not going to participate this time. There will be even more competition, and the time I can spend on it
is not even remotely close to being enough to give me sufficient results.

If you want to participate, don't do it for the prizes. Consider it as an opportunity to learn. Because you
will learn a lot by doing something new. Unless you have a team and a lot of time to dedicate to it. Then you should
probably go for the prizes.

- Michele Volpato

Development 🧑‍💻

🔗 Firebase for your Dart Web API

Do you know that you can connect to a Firebase project from Dart? Not Flutter, just Dart.
Learn more about it in this article, by Aswin Gopinathan.
In the article, Aswin implements a web server using Dart, but you can use the same method to
connect to Firebase via a pure Dart script.

🔗 Dart and Functional Programming: applying Haskell concepts with dartz

I am a fan of functional programming. The fact that you can, probably, prove that your code does
precisely what you want is a big feature. In this new article by Juan Belieni,
you'll learn how to apply some constructs belonging to Haskell to Dart,
using the dartz package.

🔗 Dart Functors, Applicatives, And Monads In Pictures

And on the subject of functional programming, here is a translation of
a popular Haskell article
into Dart. By Oleksandr Leushchenko.

[...]

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This week in Flutter #35

Michele Volpato — Sun, 02 Jan 2022 17:49:05 +0000

Last week there was no newsletter because it was Christmas. So this issue contains more links than usual.
And the Flutter team published a lot of videos in the last two weeks, so there is plenty to watch.

This week I have been using build-time environment variables
to simplify flavors in some of the Flutter apps I am working on.
I find it more maintainable compared to having a main file for each flavor.

How are you improving the maintenance of your Flutter app? Do you implement these small changes to make
future work easier? Let me know by leaving a comment.

- Michele Volpato

Development 🧑‍💻

🔗 Visualize the Flutter render tree with Explo

Do you miss the Debug View Hierarchy from Xcode? The
Explo package attempts to
recreate that exact feature in Flutter. Read how to use it
in this article by Gabriel Terwesten.

🔗 Event-Based Flutter Example

Read how to implement the publisher-subscriber pattern using the
event_bus package in this new article by Bart van Wezel.

🔗 Weekend App: 3D Print Cost Calculator

Do you want to know how much a 3D printer would cost you? Reme Le Hane created an app for that.
He writes about it, and the technologies he used, in this article.

🔗 How to implement a shimmer effect in Flutter

In this article, by David Adegoke, you'll learn how to replace those ugly circular progress
indicators with a much better, from the user experience point of view, shimmering effect.

🔗 Flutter – How to deal with global variables

Global variables are frowned upon by many developers. You should avoid having a global state that can be modified and accessed by
any object anywhere in your code.
In the article Event-Based Flutter Example, linked
above, Bart van Wezel uses a global variable in the example code. In this article,
he proposes other solutions to get rid of it.

🔗 How to add Firebase to a Flutter app with FlutterFire CLI (including multiple flavors)

With the latest version of Flutter, you can delete the old GoogleService-Info.plist and google-services.json files,
and replace them with a Dart file generated with the new FlutterFire CLI.
Learn how in this tutorial by Andrea Bizzotto.

Backend 🗄

🔗 Announcing Appwrite Dart SDK 2.0

There is an update of the Dart SDK for Appwrite, the open-source
backend server that winks at Firebase. In October they released
a new version of the Flutter SDK, and now they updated the Dart
one as well. Read what's new in this article by Damodar Lohani.

Tools 🛠

🔗 Introducing Nylo v2.2.3 for Flutter | Micro-framework

Nylo is a collection of tools that makes it
easier for a developer to create a Flutter app. It includes a route
file that you can customize for route management, some configuration files,
and tools like an app icon generator. I haven't tried it yet. It
sounds to me that I am adding "one more tool" I need to keep updated.
But don't let yourself be scared by my doubts. Try it. Nylo is
maintained by Anthony Gordon.

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This week in Flutter #34

Michele Volpato — Mon, 20 Dec 2021 08:17:12 +0000

In the previous issue of the newsletter, I linked an article about getting started with Flutter on Manjaro . Some days ago, the Ubuntu team published an article about flutter for desktop developers .

I hope that the Flutter experience on Linux gets better and better, both on the developer side and on the final app user side .

- Michele Volpato

Development 🧑‍💻

🔗 Motion Toast In Flutter

Are you tired of default, boring toast messages in your Flutter app? Have a look at the motion_toast package to spruce up your toasts. It comes with animations too. In this article, by Tusharkakkar , you'll learn how to implement them in your project.

🔗 Effective handover of api responses to your code in dart

In this article by _theGingerGeek , you'll learn how you can standardize your network responses in Dart so that your business layer does not need to handle errors and exceptions, but only a response that could be successful, or might have failed.

🔗 How to handle loading and error states with StateNotifier & AsyncValue in Flutter

Andrea Bizzotto published a new article. In this one, you'll learn how easily you can handle errors and loading states in Flutter by using riverpod 's [AsyncValue](https://pub.dev/documentation/riverpod/latest/riverpod/AsyncValue-class.html) and extending it using Dart's extension . This is a good way of avoiding repetition in your code. Even if you do not plan to use this method, you should still understand it, to make the concept behind it part of your everyday coding.

🔗 Three hidden gems that help me scaling up my Flutter apps

In this article, Rémon Helmond talks about three packages/plugins that helped him develop Flutter applications at scale. The last two are particularly interesting if your codebase is considered big , and you need to separate your code into different parts that will be developed and maintained by different groups in your organization. A must-read.

Backend 🗄

🔗 How to make your Flutter app offline-first with Couchbase Lite

Learn how Gabriel Terwesten ended up creating their own version of a Couchbase package for Dart, and how to use it in your own project. It gives you offline first and full-text search , in a lite package.

[...]

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This week in Flutter #33

Michele Volpato — Sun, 12 Dec 2021 12:53:46 +0000

Dart 2.15 has been announced , and OMG they are improving enums :

enum MyEnum {
   one, two, three
}
...
print(MyEnum.one.name);  // Prints "one".
print(MyEnum.values.byName('two') == MyEnum.two);  // Prints "true".

Maybe we will get Swift-like super enums one day.

And you have no idea how many times I declared a List with the 2.15 syntax, and it did not work:

var y = List; // Already supported.
var z = List<int>; // New in 2.15.
var z = typeOf<List<int>>(); // Pre-2.15 workaround.

Flutter 2.8 has also been announced , but my favourite news is the new Firebase UI widgets . Especially the FirestoreDataTable is going to save me so much time.

- Michele Volpato

Development 🧑‍💻

🔗 Flutter Tutorial: Stopwatch App with Custom UI and Animations 🎦

In this video by Andrea Bizzotto , you'll learn how to create a custom stopwatch . This is a lesson from his course on Flutter Animations Masterclass .

Note: I followed the course, I paid full price for it and I do not get a commission for advertising it. It's that good.

🔗 Learn Bloc in Flutter 🎦

Vandad Nahavandipoor is very active on LinkedIn sharing tips about Flutter and Dart , and other frameworks and programming languages. The goal of this streamed event was to teach how BLoC works in Flutter, answering questions from the participants. I like the content Vandad share, I think the main reason is that Vandad is a real senior developer who also creates content, not the other way around.

🔗 How to Parse Large JSON Data with Isolates in Dart 2.15

Another article by Andrea Bizzotto . In Dart 2.15 isolates , pieces of code that run independently from one another, have been improved . Andrea promptly published an article where you'll learn how to take advantage of these improvements while parsing JSON data.

Backend 🗄

🔗 How to Build a Simple CRUD Application Using Flutter and Strapi

Strapi is an open-source headless CMS . In this article, you'll learn how to integrate your Flutter app with an existing Strapi instance . This is a specific case, but if you are adding an app to your portfolio that integrates with an existing backend that already uses Strapi, then this might be helpful.

Tools 🛠

🔗 How to automate localization for Flutter apps

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