Flutter Developer Weekly

// From Mark

What Will YOU Do with Flutter in 2021?

After taking a brief break from work (and the newsletter) over the holidays, I'm feeling better prepared to tackle some of the challenges facing me this year.

It seems that there are distractions in the news all around us these days, and I'm often having to remind myself to focus on areas where I can actually make a positive difference. And because improving my app(s) is one of those areas, I'm looking forward to helping serve my customers better through the work I put into my apps.

Of course, keeping up with Flutter will play a key role in my efforts in 2021. If you agree, I hope you'll continue to follow the newsletter as 2021 unfolds.

Here's wishing you a more distraction-free and productive 2021!

Tutorials

Image Compression in Flutter

If you're developing an app in Flutter of any substantial capability, it's likely that you'll need to support image uploading. And given that on-device images can be much larger in file size than you'll actually need, you'll likely want to do some sort of compression on those images before you do the upload.

If you're looking to support image compression in your Flutter app(s), Joe Muller offers some great suggestions here, including the comparison of several popular alternatives.

Flip-Card Animation in Flutter

Sometimes you just want to add a bit of pizzazz to your app with some simple animations. I like this tutorial by David Gonzalez because it not only provides an example of a simple animation (a flip-card animation in this case), but the article also walks through the process David used while developing it.

UI Design

Practical UI/UX Design Tips - Even for Non-Designers

I've been a fan of Erik Kennedy's work for a while now, but he's really outdone himself with this Twitter thread. He's up to almost 30 UI/UX design tips so far, and he's delivered a LOT of value here.

One of the things I appreciate about Erik is that he's able to boil down the act of making artistic choices in such a way that they seem approachable, even for non-artists. He covers a large range of topics here, from positioning screen elements in a clean, understandable way, to making font and text choices, to designing color palettes -- including gradients.

If you ever find yourself without professional design help (or if you ARE that professional design help) and need to move a project forward, I really can't recommend this enough.

Great work, Erik!

Widgets and Packages

Blur or Visually Transform any Widget in Your App with ImageFiltered

Google's "Widget of the Week" this week is ImageFiltered, which allows you to easily blur or pixel-transform any widget in your app.

This is yet another example of why I love Flutter -- it gives you the ability to do some really complex stuff, wrapped in a simple API.

How Can YOU Help the Flutter Ecosystem Transition to Null Safety?

Given that there are still a LOT of packages which need to migrate to null-safe code, you may be wondering if or how you can help. This tweet by Filip Hráček summarizes a great approach.

Although I can't speak for package owners, I'm fairly certain most or all of them would welcome this kind of help!

Seven "Starter Packages" to Help Get Your App Started

If you're new to flutter or are just starting a new project, you might find this video tutorial by Robert Brunhage helpful, as he shares seven of his favorite packages which he uses at the beginning of the app dev process.

Given the diversity of opinions on a LOT of Flutter development ideas, tip #5 here might prove controversial, but it's almost always helpful to see what others consider "best practices," so hopefully you can take Robert's advice here in that light. (There are also several helpful packages listed in the comments to the video, so be sure to review these as well.)

Issue 17 January 15th 2021