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

Implicitly animated widgets

Flutter has a whole set of widgets that have animation built directly into them. This is great, but these animated widgets also mirror lots of widgets we have already seen, allowing a very easy drop replacement in your widget tree to get some great animations.

These widgets work by animating any changes to their internal state. For example, if a widget has been drawn to the screen in one color, and then a setState property changes the widget's color, then the change in color is animated rather than a single frame color switch. Let's first take a look at the AnimatedContainer widget, and then we will explore the other implicitly animated widgets available.

AnimatedContainer

The first widget to look at, and probably the most powerful, is the AnimatedContainer widget. This is very similar to the Container widget we first saw in Chapter 5, Widgets – Building Layouts in Flutter, but adds some key properties that allow it to animate changes...