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

Introducing animations

In Flutter, animations are widely supported, and the framework provides multiple ways of animating widgets. Additionally, there are built-in ready-to-use animations that we only need to plug into widgets to make them animate. Though Flutter abstracts many of the complexities that animations involve, there are some important concepts we need to understand before diving into the subject of animations.

The Animation<T> class

In Flutter, animations consist of a status and a value of type T, where the T type is defined on the creation of the Animation classes. The animation status corresponds to the animation state (that is, whether it's running or completed); its value changes while the animation runs, and it is this value that is intended to drive any widget changes during the animation execution.

Besides holding the information about the animation, this class also exposes callbacks, so other classes can know the animation's current status...