What's up Flutter? February 2018

Forewords

Flutter community is expanding, more and more great content is appearing online. I’m so delighted about it.

You will see in this listing that February was rich. Very rich. That was a lot of reading for me, but I learned a lot. I hope you will, too. You can send me a word on twitter to give me your thoughts about this report.

News and events

Februeary was short, but full of surprises. To me, the biggest one was the announce of Flutter beta:

We just announced our first beta at Mobile World Congress! Thank you to our community for helping us reach this milestone. #MWC18

Learn more here? https://t.co/uP8IwQakBl pic.twitter.com/SOIvWMcxjs
— Flutter (@flutterio) February 27, 2018

Now, you can attract your colleagues to do Flutter dev. No more "But, it’s still alpha" excuses. You will achieve to convince them with this video:

You can fin this video on Youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fq4N0hgOWzU

And finally, Google created a Github repository: Desktop Embedding for Flutter. Yep, that’s great news, but be careful: it only target macOS for now, and it’s still under heavy development.

Some resources to discover and learn Flutter

Quiznoob: Earn while you learn where John Callahan explains how he made an application connected to its Circle device. You can even find his apps and sources.
How to show a Firebase AdMob banner ad in Flutter in which Natalie Masse Hooper will teach you how to integrate banner ads in your Flutter applications, and how to make your first application with Firebase AdMob.
Integrating Flutter with Coveralls a blog post by Marcin Szalek on how to integrate your Flutter application with Travis and add it to Coveralls.
Flutter with Dart 2 shows us how simple it is to use Flutter with Dart 2, by Brian Armstrong.
The Fluture is Now! where Romain Rastel explains how he discovered Flutter (And yes, that’s my "fault" :P) and what made him love Flutter, from his C# background.
Flutter: It’s Easy to Get Started. As its title say, Gorkem Erol explains us how simple it is to install and get working on your first Flutter application. Flutter is definitively beginner-friendly.
An introduction to Flutter is an article from Wilfried Mbouenda Mbogne, giving us an overview about Flutter and why you should use it.
Planets-Flutter: planet detail page on how easy it is to implement a beautiful layout (the planet detail page), by Sergi & Replace.
Flutter Create: A back-end dev gets Flutter running for the first time is a story from David DeRemer, a back-end developer who decided to use Flutter. He explains how to setup Flutter and get your first app running.
How to implement Android runtime permission flow in Flutter where Natalie Masse Hooper shows how to implement runtime permissions, by writing some Android native code and binding it to your Flutter code. You will even discover the MVP (Model View Presenter) architecture!
Flutter FTW: Top Articles about Flutter. Want to get more articles about Flutter? Posse gathered the better ones for you.
Flutter doesn’t need Kotlin (or anything else) is an article from Luke Freeman in which he explains why he missed Kotlin while using Dart in the first time, then je learned to love Dart the same as Kotlin.
Why Flutter Uses Dart by Wm Leler. The title is quite explicit, and I hope this article will convince you Dart is the right choice for Flutter.
"Ok Google, use my Flutter app!" is an Android-oriented article from Marcin Szalek, where he integrates Google assistant in his application.
How to create landscape layouts in Flutter will show you creating a layout which can switch from portrait to landscapes is pretty simple. Natalie Masse Hooper did another great article again.
Flutorial: Create a Staggered GridView where Romain Rastel explains how to use his plugin flutter_staggered_grid_view to easily make a Stagerred GridView.

Some package releases

geocoder v0.0.1 by Alois Deniel. Access to forward and reverse geocoding functionalities.
fluttie v0.1.1 by simolus3. Display animations created in Lottie. (No iOS support for now…)
contacts_service v0.0.4 by Clovis Nicolas. Access and manage the device’s contacts.
dioc v0.0.1 by Alois Deniel. Inversion of control based on dependency injection through containers.
dioc_generator V0.0.1 by Alois Deniel. A generator of code for dioc containers.
tts v1.0.1 by Alex Blount. Convert your text to speech.
flutter_facebook_login v1.0.2 by Iiro Krankka. Use the native Facebook Login SDK in your app.
flutter_twitter_login v1.0.1 by Iiro Krankka. Use the native TwitterKit SDK in your app.
audio_recorder v0.0.1 by Jordan Alcaraz. Record audio and store it locally.
https://pub.dartlang.org/packages/f_grecaptcha v1.0.0 by simolus3. Verify that the user is human using SafetyNet API on Android devices.
flutter_staggered_grid_view v0.1.1 by Romain Rastel. A Flutter staggered grid view which supports multiple columns with rows of varying sizes.

Conclusion

Whoa! February was short, but the community is more productive every day. I hope it will continue to grow that way for a long time. However, collecting links and reading every articles was a lot a work, and I wonder if it is still pertinent. Next month, I may give a try to a more personal and less time consuming form of this report. I’m not all decided about it, you will see it at the end of March.

See you next month !

I hope you enjoyed this second publication of What’s up Flutter. If I forgot something, made some mistakes, or if you want to appear in next What’s up Flutter publications, just let me know on my Twitter.

Cover image by Noah Silliman