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)

Introduction to responsiveness and adaptiveness

In Flutter you will commonly hear the terms adaptive and responsive when referring to building applications. While these terms are both related to layout, they have very different meanings:

  • Responsive design refers to adjusting the layout of the application for the available screen size.
  • Adaptive design refers to adjusting the behavior, layout, and even the UI of the application for the platform or device type in use, such as mobile, desktop, or web.

An application can be responsive without being adaptive, or adaptive without being responsive. Alternatively, an application can be neither. We have all opened a fair share of applications that, regardless of the device, still look and behave like mobile applications. The starter version of our Notes application does just that.

Run flutter run -d {platform} from the notes_app folder, substituting {platform} for the desktop platform that you are developing on. Even though...