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

Transforming widgets with the Transform class

We have looked at lots of widgets throughout the previous chapters, but sometimes we may need to change a widget's appearance to improve the UX. In response to user input or to make cool effects in the layout, we may need to move the widget around the screen, change its size, or even distort it a little bit.

If you've ever tried to achieve this in native programming languages, you may have found it difficult. Flutter, as mentioned previously, is highly focused on UI design and aims to make the developer's life easier by simplifying what could easily have been a complicated area.

In this section, we will first look at the Transform widget because it is an incredibly useful widget when you look at widget manipulation. We will then delve deeper into the widget to see the kinds of manipulations it allows us to do.

The Transform widget

The Transform widget is one of the best examples of the Flutter framework&apos...