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

Exploring mobile device features

There are a lot of features in devices, especially mobile phones or tablets, that your app can use to make the UX better. Normally, you would need to write device-specific code to access these features, but in Flutter, access to the features is generally available within a plugin. In this section, we will take a whistle-stop tour of some of these features, including the camera, web browser, local storage, and video playback, so that you can enhance the usability of the apps you create using the plugins that are already available to you.

Camera and QR codes

A key feature that mobile phones and tablets have is the camera. This can obviously be used for photos, but it can also be used for other functionality such as Quick Response (QR) scanning.

A couple of plugins to check out are camera (built by the Flutter.dev team) and qr_code_scanner.

The qr_code_scanner plugin contains the following two key things:

  1. A QRView widget that you place...