Book Image

Cross-Platform UIs with Flutter

By : Ryan Edge, Alberto Miola
Book Image

Cross-Platform UIs with Flutter

By: Ryan Edge, Alberto Miola

Overview of this book

Flutter is a UI toolkit for building beautiful, natively compiled applications for mobile, web, desktop, and embedded devices from a single code base. With Flutter, you can write your code once and run it anywhere using a single code base to target multiple platforms. This book is a comprehensive, project-based guide for new and emerging Flutter developers that will help empower you to build bulletproof applications. Once you start reading book, you’ll quickly realize what sets Flutter apart from its competition and establish some of the fundamentals of the toolkit. As you work on various project applications, you’ll understand just how easy Flutter is to use for building stunning UIs. This book covers navigation strategies, state management, advanced animation handling, and the two main UI design styles: Material and Cupertino. It’ll help you extend your knowledge with good code practices, UI testing strategies, and CI setup to constantly keep your repository’s quality at the highest level possible. By the end of this book, you'll feel confident in your ability to transfer the lessons from the example projects and build your own Flutter applications for any platform you wish.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Setting up the project

In this chapter, we will learn how to use Flutter’s navigation APIs to build an interactive, multi-page Hacker News application that will allow us to navigate from lists of articles or stories, to their detail pages. Hacker News is a social news website focusing on computer science and entrepreneurship.

When we have finished, the resulting application should mirror Figure 5.1:

Figure 5.1 – Hacker News app

In Figure 5.1, we see three different screens:

  • A home screen that has tabs for each Story Type
  • A details or comments screen that renders Hacker News in a WebView
  • A story link view that renders the original story source URL in a WebView

Additionally, when tapping on an already selected tab from either the details or the story screen, we should be redirected back to the list view for that Story Type.

We will start with an example that has one empty page with tabs that match the Hacker News web...