Forewords

Here we are, a new month, a new season, and fresh flutter news! Like I said last month, I will try something new, more personal. In this issue, I will not try to read and sum up every links I found, but dive deeper into articles which attracted me more. I hope you will enjoy this experiment. You can still give me your opinion on twitter[https://twitter.com/triskeon].

What to do after Helloworld?

I was crawling the r/FlutterDev channel on Reddit, and I stumbled on this post:

Simple state management using Flutter/Dart way from r/FlutterDev

Whether you like Redux/Flux or not, this is a basic architecture to know. If you are a beginner, and you want to go further the classical Helloworld tutorial, you should read the code on the GitHub repository.

I enjoyed it quite a lot. It shows you Redux is not mandatory, and you can afford using Flutter with no particular dependency. You will discover InheritedWidget usage in a project really easy to understand.

To sum up, I discovered that not using Redux can be quite clean and OK. And the idea of rediscovering simple code architecture hyped me a lot.

Embedding a Flutter app on Linux desktop

This GitHub directory attracted my eyes. After MacOS last month, this month, Linux desktop. Yay!

Here is an extract of the README file:

The Flutter Linux Desktop Embedder

This framework provides the basic functionality for embedding a Flutter app on the Linux desktop. This currently includes support for:

  • Drawing a Flutter view.

  • Mouse event handling.

That’s still under heavy development, but that’s great news, isn’t it ?

How fast is Flutter?

While I was on Twitter, this post ticked me:

In his article, Andrea Bizzotto experimented Flutter execution’s speed against a native iOS application using Swift. If you are fond of optimisation and performance, this one should tick you too. But be careful! That’s just one use case, Flutter may have different speed on your project.

However, I was glad to see someone writing about Flutter performances without saying it is far better that other solutions. This bit of objectivity was like some fresh air to me, as I love both native and Flutter development. Flutter is not perfect for every usage (but performances seems to be quite good anyway), keep this is mind and adapt yourself.

Charts

I was waiting for my colleague Aloïs Deniel to port his cool C# library Microcharts (based on Skia, yay!) to Dart/Flutter, and the charts_flutter package came to me.

You can discover it through this article written by Michael Thomsen. No more excuses not to include charts in your apps!

(BTW, Aloïs, if you read this: I’m still greedily waiting for Microcharts for Flutter)

Conclusion

That few links where the ones which made me tick, I hope you will find some interest reading them, and you will learn as much as I did.

I found this new way of summing up my month in Flutter more pleasant: by writing about my favourite articles, I am way more involved and I can go deeper. I will try to follow this path and improve next month.

See you in April!

I hope you enjoyed this new issue of What’s up Flutter. If I was wrong on some point, or if you want more information about what I just wrote, just let me know on my Twitter.

Cover picture by Andrea Reiman