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

DevTools

Dart DevTools is defined in the documentation as follows:

"A suite of performance tools for Dart and Flutter."

DevTools can also be accessed via the web browser. You may have seen the URL alongside the Observatory URL when you did a flutter run. However, most people will use DevTools from within their IDE, so let's explore that option further.

If you still have the Hello World app running, then you will see a magnifying glass on the debug controls. Click this button to open up the wonderful world of DevTools.

The widget inspector

We are currently in debug mode, so the widget inspector will be opened for us, allowing us to inspect the layout of our app. The widget inspector allows us to check whether our widget tree is taking more space than needed, whether it has more widgets than needed, or whether a widget is being created at the right time/level.

Open up the widget inspector and you will have a view similar to this:

...