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

Screen transitions

Changing screens needs to look smooth for the user. You want the user to enjoy their experience within your app, and jarring screen transitions can impact their enjoyment and flow.

As we have seen, MaterialPageRoute and CupertinoPageRoute are classes that add a route to the navigator and you may have noticed as we experimented with the example app that they add a transition between the old and new Route. These transitions align with the platform defaults but can be customized as well.

On Android, for example, the entrance transition for the page slides the page upward and fades it in. The exit transition does the same in reverse. On iOS, the page slides in from the right and exits in reverse.

Flutter lets us customize this behavior by adding our own transitions between screens. To do this, we need to look a little deeper at routes.

PageRouteBuilder

PageRouteBuilder is a helper class that can be used for custom Route creation, instead of using the...