DEV Community: Jethro Lorenzo Garcia Lising

Flutter localization gotcha with iOS Emulator

Jethro Lorenzo Garcia Lising — Thu, 16 Jul 2020 16:52:42 +0000

Problem

When you use the intl package to get the current locale, it will always return English or 'en', when you use the iOS simulator.

Even when you set the language and region in the iOS settings, it will always return 'en'.

// This retrieves the current local
Intl.getCurrentLocale();  // returns 'en' using iOS Simulator

Solution

Came across this github issue.

And the solution was found.

Edit info.plist found in ios/Runner and add two configurations:

Localizations

Add your supported languages or any languages that you need to test.

Localized resources can be mixed

Set to YES.

For good measure, flutter clean and rebuild.

My Productivity Tools as a Software Engineer

Jethro Lorenzo Garcia Lising — Sun, 17 May 2020 19:10:12 +0000

Staying organized is hard. As a software engineer, writing code is probably 1/4th of the battle. You have to stay on top of your knowledge for long-term storage. You need to keep a Dev journal to record your insights. You need an interstitial journal to reflect and switch contexts mindfully. You need a way to securely and privately track your time spent on projects and to track future-events and meetings.

This is why I delegate my second brain (long-term) into different apps that handle one and only thing.

These are the tools I use to manage my projects and my life. They are mostly found in the Apple ecosystem, but alternatives are listed below.

Bear: for knowledge-base

Private Markdown Notes for iPhone, iPad and Mac | Bear App
For permanent notes (zetels) and trees (mind garden)
For literature notes and reference notes as well
For long-term knowledge
Good for code-snippets, syntax highlighting is available
Premium is required for Mac OS and iOS sync
Alternative: Joplin - an open source note taking and to-do application with synchronisation capabilities

Agenda: date-focused working notes with a project context

Agenda - Date-focused Note Taking.
For notes that do have a project context
- some notes you took on a project or meeting
Assign notes that are “On The Agenda” for focus
This is great if you keep a dev journal or an interstitial journal
Alternative: Joplin - an open source note taking and to-do application with synchronisation capabilities

Trello: project and life management

Trello
A kanban (signboard, in Japanese)
Visualize work
Limiting work in progress
Follow Personal Kanban for how to manage life
Follow Agile methodology to manage projects

Standard Notes: secure raw notes

Standard Notes | A Simple And Private Notes App
For secure cross-platform (iOS, Android, Web) notes
These are good for ephemeral, raw notes without a project context
Also works as a small password manager
Alternative: Joplin - an open source note taking and to-do application with synchronisation capabilities

Note: Yes Joplin can replace Standard Notes, Agenda, and Bear.

Apple Calendar: appointments and time-blocked events

Speaks for itself.
Alternative: Google Calendar

Apple Reminders: one-time and recurring reminders

For recurring reminders (“Take Out Recycling for collection”, “Wash bedsheets”)
Also good for one-off reminders
Integrates with Agenda
Alternative: Google Tasks

Timewarrior: time-tracking

Timewarrior - Done yet?
To keep track of the time spent on a project or activity
Cons: command-line only
Still looking for a simple, cross platform solution (Web, Desktop, Mobile)
Alternative for Mobile: GitHub - hamaluik/timecop: A time tracking app that respects your privacy and the gets the job done without being fancy.

I made a simple meditation app with Flutter in ONE WEEK

Jethro Lorenzo Garcia Lising — Mon, 11 May 2020 15:41:40 +0000

I was just looking for a clean implementation of a meditation app. I just want something that would get me to meditating as fast as I can.

I don't want to sign up or be offered a subscription or a paid course, or to even hear a guide. The most popular one like Headspace, and Calm had IAPs and probably some sort of analytics (to keep the shareholders informed! Results have to be measured somehow!).

I really just wanted a simple meditation app that got to the point as fast and as beautiful as possible.

So I made my own app: justBreathe

It's simple a meditation timer. You determine how long the session is; if you want a ticking timer or a beautiful animation; and if you want to hear a gong at the beginning and end of the session.

This is my gift to the world. If this app helps someone attain clarity, and relaxation, even just one person, then all of the man-hours I've put into it would be worth it.

How Flutter enabled my Vision

Flutter really helps developers iterate VERY quickly. Especially for a solo-project, where you literally have the control to create and define your own features, the sky is the limit.

I didn't need much to get started. I just needed a State Management solution outside of setState (because I needed an easy way to pass and share data between Widgets, without implementing my own InheritedWidget or ScopedModel). I read a few articles on it, like Simple App State Management and Flutter State Management: setState, BLoC, ValueNotifier, Provider. Provider and ChangeNotifier were more than enough for this use-case.

The implementation doesn't have a clear or strong architecture. I just went with what I knew, which was a typical MVC-U architecture. Well, in this case, Data-Screen-Utils architecture. I separated the domain of data, business logic, and UI. Though there's much more work to be done in terms of refactoring, getting to an MVP took less than 3 days.
The animations were easy to work with.

Having had experience with Pebble and animations using C language, working with Dart was a breeze and an absolute pleasure. I implemented page Route transitions with the help of some code from @gskinner_team with their article Flutter: Simplify your PageRoutes.

It was easy to add simple animations through the app to make the experience better.

When I finally had my MVP, I began to work on localization. I used the intl package and with the help of Localizely's Intl extension, (and with the help of my GF and a generous and skilled translator on Reddit), I manage to implement french localizations!

Publishing

I was eager to publish. I just had to follow this article from flutter.dev on how to release an Android App. It was easy to do.

I used fastlane as my CD, but to get to the market fast, I just literally did flutter build appbundle. Took screenshots and published to production on Google Play Console.

The review process took 6 days. This means between planning, developing, publishing this app, the publishing review process took longer than the app creation process! Granted it's a simple MVP, but I just want to emphasize how quick the development process was.

Final Thoughts

Overall, creating a Flutter App allows for the creation of beautiful and performant apps, very quickly. As a one-man team, this project was enjoyable. Flutter really allowed me to express my creativity and fulfill my vision.

I hope to learn more and create more complex apps.

What's Next?

More translations (Swedish namely)
Use codemagic to build, test, and release to both App Store and Play Store
Write some tests (before I add updates and new features)
And add more beautiful animations!

Check it out and I hope you find the way to ultimate happiness!

Source Code - https://github.com/jg-l/justBreathe
Play Store - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ca.lising.justbreathe
Official website - https://justbreathe.lising.ca/

Fish Shell: Functions

Jethro Lorenzo Garcia Lising — Wed, 29 Apr 2020 15:46:51 +0000

In this article, we will explore how to create and save fish shell functions on the fly.
This is useful if you need to automate things in the shell.

Tested on fish version: 3.0.2

Create a function

Use funced [1] to edit and create a function[2] interactively.
It will provide a scaffold to write a function on the terminal.

$ funced
function hello
    echo hello world
end

Tip: If you have $EDITOR configured, it will open that instead

Hitting Enter will save the function hello into this session. Running hello will echo "hello world".

This function will only be available for this session. It will not be saved for future sessions.

Save a function

To save our hello function so that we can use it in future sessions, we use funcsave[3].

This will save hello into a file in our configuration directory, where it will automatically be loaded for future sessions.

You can see this function saved in ~/.config/fish/functions/hello.fish.

Make your functions descriptive

It's always good to document our functions, especially if we are writing it with the intent to share with other people. For that, we use the --description option.

Use funced hello to edit the previously defined hello function. Now we can make any changes and use funcsave if we want to save it.

Continuing our previous example we can define a description option to set a description for our function.

Tip: you can use -d as a shortcut to --description

Function arguments

If we want to make our hello function say what we want, we can use arguments!

In our function, we have access to $argv which is a variable list of arguments that the function received.

This is a welcomed changed from bash which has numbered variables like $1 to access the first argument of the function.

If we wanted the first argument of a function, we simply call $argv[1].

Note: Fish shell indices start at 1, not 0. Fish tries to be modern this way.

Use named function arguments

To make it more readable, we can use named arguments. This is much friendlier to read compared to $argv[1].

The --arguments or -a option allows us to specify variable names for arguments that we specify.

The variable $greeting and $name correspond to the first and second arguments of the say function.

Learn More

I hope you learned a new thing about the fish shell and how to write your own functions! You can always read more about fish shell functions here.

Until then, keep learning!