Flutter

Introduction A productive app should not have it. So here is how you can remove the Flutter debug banner in your applications. The debug banner should indicate that an app is currently under development. By default, it is displayed when you launch your Flutter app. A lot of beginners struggle with it and need help. However, the change is quite simple. So here is how to remove the debug banner in a Flutter application. ...

Introduction In this article, I’ll show you how to store Flutter app data on your device with the plugin shared_preferences. It’s the default solution when you want to store some data! Shared Preferences is a useful tool for persisting small amounts of data, such as user settings. It’s a key-value store similar to a Dictionary in Dart. The API is easy to learn, with getter and setter methods for various types like Int, Double, Bool, String, and StringList. Let’s learn how to store Flutter app data on your device with it! ...

Introduction Firebase is the perfect choice to add cloud capabilities to your apps. Here is how to create a Firebase project and link it with your Flutter app. Start your Firebase journey with this guide! Firebase is a lightweight app development platform of Google offering various services like databases, authentication, messaging, and many more. It offers SDKs for different programming languages and is well-documented. In this article, you’ll learn how to create a Firebase project and link it with your Flutter app. ...

Introduction This short article shows how to install packages in your Flutter app so that you can use existing code and you don’t have to write everything yourself. With packages, the development of apps can be accelerated and simplified by a lot. We have a look at how to find packages, how to add them to our app, and how we can use them in the code. For demonstration purposes, I am going to use the package url_launcher in this example. Here is how to install packages in your Flutter app. ...

Introduction People like charts. They are an easy way to display data. So here is how to create beautiful line charts in a Flutter app. This is perfect for any dashboard you want to build! With line charts, you can visualize a variety of data. Think about daily sales of the last 30 days or accumulated revenues of the current year. It’s a perfect way to show users values that change over time. In this article, I want to show you how to create beautiful line charts in a Flutter app. ...

Introduction Microsoft is a big player in the enterprise environment. So here is how to log in from a Flutter Web App with a Microsoft organization account. Once the setup is complete, it works flawlessly! You have a Flutter Web App (no Android or iOS) and need to add the possibility that users can log in with their Microsoft organization accounts. It sounds like a rather simple task but it took me quite a while to solve it. To save you the trouble, here is how to log in from a Flutter Web App with a Microsoft account. ...

Introduction Learn how to create beautiful charts and graphs in your Flutter application to create dashboards or visualize statistic evaluations. With this article you can get started quickly! In this article, I’ll show you how to create beautiful charts and graphs in your Flutter application. I’ll cover the tools and methods to create good-looking and interactive charts. Whether you’re making a finance app, a data dashboard, or just want to make your app look better, learning how to make charts in Flutter can be a big help. ...

Introduction Here is how to use the Scaffold widget in a Flutter application to create a consistent app skeleton in no time. It’s the most common basic building block in Flutter apps and here is how it works! In Flutter, a Scaffold is a fundamental building block used to create the basic structure and layout for an app’s user interface. It provides a pre-designed app bar, a body area, and other essential components, making it easier for developers to create consistent and standard app layouts. Think of it as a template for your app’s screen with that you can start development faster. ...

Introduction Here is how to implement drag and drop in a Flutter application and build awesome user interfaces for all input types. Give your users some gestures to play around! Drag and drop is a common UX pattern on mobile, tablets, and desktops. It’s easy and convenient, regardless of the input type (finger, stylus, mouse) you use. Here’s how to implement drag and drop in a Flutter application. Draggable We start with the Draggable widget. This is the widget the users can drag in your Flutter app. You need to provide a child and a feedback widget. ...

Introduction I never really had trouble with lists in dart. But only until I used null values. Don’t fall for this trap like I did! I came across a strange error during development of a game app recently. The game required a 2-dimensional array or list to represent a table structure. To do this, I chose the data type List<List<MyObject>>. At the beginning, I initialized the structure with null values. Here is the code ...

Introduction Challenging your users with questions is common. So here is how to make a simple quiz page widget for Flutter apps. There are tons of quiz apps out there in the app stores. If you ever thought about making your own, then here is a tutorial on how to make a simple quiz page widget for Flutter apps. Eventually, it will look like this: ...

Introduction Here are my observations after extensively testing and building feature-rich apps using both Google and Microsoft frameworks. For the past few years, I have been developing both small and large Flutter applications. Flutter is an amazing framework that allows for the quick development of cross-platform apps. Initially, it was just another tool for me to experiment with, but now it’s my primary choice for new mobile projects without any hesitation. ...

Introduction Here’s how you can animate your Flutter widgets to make your app stand out from the rest with ease. Make your apps look nicer and present your users a better UX with animations! Animations are the icing on your app cake. Fortunately, the Flutter team has put a lot of effort into making animations as easy as possible. In this article, I’ll show you how it’s done. I’ll also provide a sample application at the end, so you can try out everything discussed in this guide. ...

Introduction I built a WhatsApp clone with Flutter and Firebase in a few hours. Here is what I came up with. There are a ton of messaging apps available. Some well-known players are WhatsApp, Threema, Signal, and others. Apart from a messaging functionality, they provide many other features like group chats, file transmission, or data backup. In my little experiment, I tried to recreate the messaging feature that all apps use. My requirements were the following: ...

Introduction Save coding time by using Firebase Extensions and create an URL shortening service in minutes! Here’s the full guide. With a few simple steps, you can build your own personal URL shortening service. All you need is a Firebase account and a Bitly account. The setup involves no coding. To test the service, we will write a small Flutter app. Firebase offers a variety of extensions. The major benefit is that you gain functionality without having to code anything yourself. I already wrote a detailed article about it if you need more details. ...

Introduction Here is how you can implement the swipe-to-dismiss pattern in ListViews of a Flutter applications. It takes 5 minutes to implement it. Swipe to delete is a common UI pattern in mobile applications. The user swipes an element in a direction and the system reacts with an action. Common use cases include removing entries from lists or making toast notifications disappear, for example. In this short article, I will show you how to implement the pattern in a ListView of a Flutter application. ...

Introduction Here is how you add and use linters in your Flutter app to enhance and maintain higher code quality. Customize them to your needs! With linters and linting rules, you can verify clean code principles and maintain high code quality during the development process of your Flutter app. A linter is a tool that analyzes source code to detect and report potential errors or issues. When you use a code editor like VSCode or Android Studio and you build your project, a static code analysis is executed to ensure, the code is free of compile errors. It uses the dart analyze command internally. On top of that, you can include additional rules with custom linters. ...

Introduction With Firebase Extensions you can build a simple text translation app that does most of the work for you. There are many ways to build a translation app. In this article, I am going to show you how to use Firebase for that task. A Flutter app will transmit the text to be translated to Firebase and display the final result. We will use Firebase Cloud Firestore and a Firebase Extension called Translate Text for this purpose. ...

Introduction Flutter offers predefined widgets for dialogs, toasts, and overlays. This article shows how you use them properly with code examples. Here is how to work with dialogs, toasts, and overlays in Flutter apps! Dialogs are a common pattern in many applications. In this article, I’ll introduce you to the built-in possibilities of Flutter for creating dialogs. We will cover the following widget types: ▶ AlertDialog (and CupertinoAlertDialog) ▶ SimpleDialog ▶ Dialog ▶ Overlay ▶ Toast ...

Introduction Instead of writing code yourself, you can always use generators to create Dart model classes from JSON. Here are the results of my evaluation of some free tools for you. For this test, I created a sample JSON structure that all tools need to deal with. You can find it below: Every converter will receive the same input and I’ll examine the created output. Is it runnable? Is null-safety supported? Is the code efficient? Is anything missing? Have a look at the results below. ...