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

Introducing animations

In Flutter, animations are widely supported, and the framework provides multiple ways of animating widgets. Additionally, there are built-in ready-to-use animations that we only need to plug into widgets to make them animate. Though Flutter abstracts many of the complexities that animations involve, there are some important concepts we need to understand before diving into the subject of animations.

The Animation<T> class

In Flutter, the Animation class consists of a status and a value of the T type, where T is defined on the instantiation of the Animation class. The animation’s status corresponds to the animation’s state (that is, if it’s running or completed); its value changes while the animation runs, and it is this value that is intended to drive any widget changes during the animation’s execution.

This class also exposes callbacks so that other classes can know the animation’s current status and value.

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