Book Image

Flutter for Beginners - Second Edition

By : Thomas Bailey, Alessandro Biessek
Book Image

Flutter for Beginners - Second Edition

By: Thomas Bailey, Alessandro Biessek

Overview of this book

There have been many attempts at creating frameworks that are truly cross-platform, but most struggle to create a native-like experience at high performance levels. Flutter achieves this with an elegant design and a wealth of third-party plugins, making it the future of mobile app development. If you are a mobile developer who wants to create rich and expressive native apps with the latest Google Flutter framework, this book is for you. This book will guide you through developing your first app from scratch all the way to production release. Starting with the setup of your development environment, you'll learn about your app's UI design and responding to user input via Flutter widgets, manage app navigation and screen transitions, and create widget animations. You'll then explore the rich set of third party-plugins, including Firebase and Google Maps, and get to grips with testing and debugging. Finally, you'll get up to speed with releasing your app to mobile stores and the web. By the end of this Flutter book, you'll have gained the confidence to create, edit, test, and release a full Flutter app on your own.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Section 1: Introduction to Flutter and Dart
6
Section 2: The Flutter User Interface – Everything Is a Widget
10
Section 3: Developing Fully Featured Apps
14
Section 4: Testing and App Release

Understanding Google Maps and Places

You will have likely used Google Maps for navigation, but the use of Google Places is not so obvious. This is generally used when you enter an address into a textbox, and while you are entering it, there are suggestions for the full address.

Simply put, Google Places is where you find an address, and Google Maps is where you display that address. There are many plugins that support Google Maps and Places, so when choosing, make sure you look at the pub.dev scores.

A very good Google Maps plugin is google_maps_flutter, which is created by the Flutter development team. In pub.dev, you can click on the author—in this case, flutter.dev—and view all the plugins that the development team has created. Looking through the flutter.dev team's plugins is a great way to get a feel for all the different plugins available.

There are plugins for Google Places, but an alternative is the google_maps_webservice plugin, which is a wrapper...