News
Announcing Rive 2
Does your app include complex animations which seem beyond the scope of AnimatedContainer and its built-in siblings? If so, you've probably either explored or are already using something like Rive to handle those animations. Rive 2 has just been announced, so if you want to come up to speed on Rive's new capabilities, head on over to this Rive blog post and sign up for the beta.
Code Craft
Making Your UI Code More Declarative
Even though this article from Bob Nystrom of the Dart team is more that a year old now, it highlights how some of the relatively newer language features in Dart can help you move some of those imperative elements in your code to more declarative ones. Spreads, Collection If, and Collection For, anyone?
How to Compare 2 Objects
Sounds simple enough, right? Well, not always. If you're not familiar with how object comparison should work in your own code, this tutorial offers a solid overview of the basics.
Tutorials
Asynchrony Primer for Dart and Flutter
If you really want to deep-dive into how asynchronous code works in Dart and Flutter, this multi-part series by Monty Rassmussen should be super helpful. It covers everything from isolates, micro-tasks, and the event loop, to futures, completers, streams and sinks. Highly recommended!
Getting Started with Flutter Desktop
Anyone who has used Flutter is familiar with building cross-platform mobile apps, but are you also considering Flutter for building your native desktop apps? As support for Flutter Desktop continues to mature, this seems like an increasingly realistic possibility. If you're still coming up to speed on the state of Flutter Desktop and its capabilities, you might find this overview of recent developments helpful, along with the official Flutter Desktop page on flutter.dev.
Tips & Tricks
Implementing Complex UI with Flutter
Have you ever seen a cool design concept on Dribbble or elsewhere and tried to figure out how you might implement that design in a Flutter app? In this video tutorial from Flutter Europe, Marcin Szałek goes through several design exercises, explaining how he would approach implementing each of them. Regardless of your experience level with Flutter, if you haven't already seen Marcin's talk, I highly recommend it.
// From Mark
Life and the People We Share It With
Sorry to start off on such a personal note this week, but my brother-in-law passed away yesterday. A relatively young victim of cancer, he leaves behind a loving wife and several young children, all of whom are already missing their dad terribly.
Even though cancer is a horrible disease, it at least afforded my brother-in-law a sort of "heads-up" that he would soon be leaving us. To see the way in which he spent his last few months with his family, including time with each of his kids, has been truly inspiring.
Seeing this unfold has reminded me that even though the work we do while here on this earth is important, it's the people in our lives who are even more so.
If you have someone in your life with whom you haven't connected in a while, hopefully this will serve as a reminder to reach out. Even with social distancing at the top of our minds these days, connection with people -- virtually or otherwise -- is what makes this whole thing worth doing.
Mark Winters