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

Let’s Get Graphical!

In this chapter, we will build on our high-level understanding of the built-in widgets by learning how to make them look pretty. A slick and well-styled user interface not only enhances the clarity of the app’s functionality but also elevates the user experience, increasing the likelihood of users wanting to continue its use.

There are many ways to add styling to existing widgets and to use new widgets that we haven’t seen yet, which can give us great default styling. Our focus in this chapter will be the static graphics – how a widget looks in a resting state, and perhaps how it looks in an active state – and we will move on to animations and advanced graphics in Chapter 11, Using Widget Manipulations and Animations.

This is definitely one of the most fun aspects of Flutter because it is so easy to make a widget or a full page look beautiful. It feels like Flutter was born to be pretty and you just need to give it a gentle...