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

Handling user gestures

A mobile application would be very limited without some kind of interactivity. The Flutter framework allows the handling of user gestures in every possible way, from simple taps to drag and pan gestures. The screen events in Flutter's gesture system are separated into two layers, as follows:

  • Pointers layer: This layer holds the raw information about how a pointer (for example, a touch, mouse, or stylus) is interacting with the screen. This raw data will include the location and movement of the pointer.
  • Gestures layer: This layer takes multiple pointer actions and tries to assign them some meaning as a user action. These semantic actions (for example, a tap, drag, or scale) are often more useful to the application, and they are the most typical way of implementing user input handling.

Pointers

Flutter starts screen input handling in the low-level pointer layer. Generally, there is no need to use events from this layer in your application...