Book Image

Flutter for Beginners

By : Alessandro Biessek
Book Image

Flutter for Beginners

By: Alessandro Biessek

Overview of this book

Google Flutter is a cross-platform mobile framework that makes it easy to write high-performance apps for Android and iOS. This book will help you get to grips with the basics of the Flutter framework and the Dart programming language. Starting from setting up your development environment, you’ll learn to design the UI and add user input functions. You'll explore the navigator widget to manage app routes and learn to add transitions between screens. The book will even guide you through developing your own plugin and later, you’ll discover how to structure good plugin code. Using the Google Places API, you'll also understand how to display a map in the app and add markers and interactions to it. You’ll then learn to improve the user experience with features such as map integrations, platform-specific code with native languages, and personalized animation options for designing intuitive UIs. The book follows a practical approach and gives you access to all relevant code files hosted at github.com/PacktPublishing/Flutter-for-Beginners. This will help you access a variety of examples and prepare your own bug-free apps, ready to deploy on the App Store and Google Play Store. By the end of this book, you’ll be well-versed with Dart programming and have the skills to develop your own mobile apps or build a career as a Dart and Flutter app developer.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: Introduction to Dart
5
Section 2: The Flutter User Interface - Everything is a Widget
10
Section 3: Developing Fully Featured Apps
15
Section 4: Advanced Flutter - Resources to Complex Apps

Launching a URL from the app

Until now, we have seen how we can use Flutter plugins to add specific features to apps. In the Favors app, for the user profile picture, for example, we have used a plugin that launches the camera app and awaits for an image file: the image_picker plugin. This plugin acts as a bridge for us, and the camera app is independent from the underlying system, as we do not need to know how to launch the camera app and how to take the image file, we just ask it to do the hard work for us.

Taking a profile picture is a good use of a plugin, as in a future version of the app, we could allow the user to import the image from the gallery and use it in the same way. The image_picker plugin used does this job as well.

Now let's imagine another use case: a user asks a favor from another user that involves accessing a URL to get more context about the favor...