Learning Flutter

-

 I've been learning Flutter in order to help my team out with a new project we are taking on. At first I was skeptical, since cross-platform frameworks usually end up sacrificing something to run on so many different platforms. However, I was really impressed with Flutter, especially when I saw our teams app running in the web, on Windows and on an Android phone, and it looked good on every device!

I started out with the Flutter Development Bootcamp by Dr. Angela Yu on Udemy, where I quickly learned the basics of getting an app set up, changing the app logo, and the core structure of a Flutter application. I wasn't sure about the everything-is-a-widget structure at first, but it ended up making so much sense! I always felt like building something that looks amazing was within reach, and the auto-format always made my code look great. It reminded me of components in React, although I think I prefer widgets.

I ended up building several simple applications while following with the tutorial, before I had to get focused on the actual application my team and I were to be building. Most notably I built a stylish BMI Calculator and a simple Weather app using Android's location services.

What I liked about Flutter:

  • Widgets are easy to use
  • You can peek at the Flutter code and existing Material widgets
  • It's quick to get an MVP up and running
  • There are loads of Dart packages available to use

What I didn't like:

  • Dart is a good language, I felt it similar to TypeScript (I've heard it compared to Swift and Kotlin, but I haven't worked in those languages) but it isn't really used for anything other than Flutter, so it's hard to justify a framework that uses a specific language that you won't use on anything else.
  • Flutter for the web is a bit tricky. It went much better than I expected and actually most of my development has been on a web app, but it's not perfect. Ultimately we want a cross-platform app, so Flutter makes sense, but if you are focused on a web app then I would stick to a web focused framework.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Reviewing WPF and MVVM

-
Image
 I've been working in WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) a lot lately. WPF is a great way to build a Windows desktop application, it's been around for many years and is very mature compared to UWP (Universal Windows Platform) which is a similar tool for creating desktop applications. It's not the newest, shiniest tool but it is definitely a great tool to be aware of. A while back I built a simple WPF program that worked with a .NET function library that did very simple distance calculations, and I decided to review that before really getting into more advanced concepts. When the program runs, it looks like this:   It's nothing too fancy, but it will show travel time, rate of travel and distance traveled over time. It also allows an excel spreadsheet to be inputted and it will run many calculations and then update the spreadsheet. The layout here is primarily built using the XAML grid, a staple of any WPF application. The grid specifies how many rows and columns the g...
Read more

Using WebRTC to build a videophone in React and TypeScript

-
 Recently I had the opportunity to spend more time learning React, as well as Redux and a bit about WebRTC. I was prototyping a website that allows you to make video calls to other users, and I thought it was really cool how out-of-the-box WebRTC is. I also used TypeScript, even though I had some trouble in the past with React-TypeScript applications, and it went pretty well. There was some finicky things and it required me to learn the types of objects I had never used before, but overall I think it went pretty well.   The server is built with express, and uses socket.io to emit the web-rtc requests. There is no authentication or authorization, I was mainly focused on showing that I could make a video call.It uses Redux to handle state management, which was a bit tricky in TypeScript and felt like I was writing a lot of repeat code, but it got the job done better than it would have without it. Ultimately this project ended up being put on the backburner as my team turned...
Read more