Book Image

Flutter for Beginners - Third Edition

By : Thomas Bailey, Alessandro Biessek
5 (2)
Book Image

Flutter for Beginners - Third Edition

5 (2)
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, solidifying its status as 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. You’ll start with the basics of cross-platform development frameworks, specifically Flutter. You’ll then explore the Dart programming language which is the foundation of the Flutter framework. Next, you’ll get a feel for Flutter and how to create your first app, followed by an exploration of the various popular plugins that supplement the Flutter framework. Finally, you’ll explore testing and app release, including some common glitches that you may experience. By the end of this book, you’ll be well-equipped to create and release a basic Flutter app along with gaining a solid understanding of the Flutter framework and Dart language.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
1
Part 1:Learning the Core Concepts
6
Part 2:Building a Basic Flutter App
11
Part 3:Turning a Simple App into an Awesome App
15
Part 4:Testing and Releasing Your App

Exploring mobile device features

There are a lot of features in devices, especially mobile phones or tablets, that your app can use to make the UX better. Normally, you would need to write device-specific code to access these features, but in Flutter, access to the features is generally available within a plugin. In this section, we will take a whistle-stop tour of some of these features, including the camera, web browser, local storage, and video playback, so that you can enhance the usability of the apps you create using the plugins that are already available to you.

Camera and QR codes

A key feature that mobile phones and tablets have is the camera. This can be used for photos, but it can also be used for other functionality, such as Quick Response (QR) scanning.

A couple of plugins to check out are camera (built by the Flutter.dev team) and qr_code_scanner.

The qr_code_scanner plugin contains the following two key things:

  • A QRView widget that you place in your...