Top 5 Flutter 2.0 features you should know

Rahul Mahesh — Fri, 02 Apr 2021 07:32:43 +0000

What's new in Flutter 2.0?

Google launched Flutter 2.0 at an event named Flutter Engage, with all the extraordinary features and fixes. In this stable release, Flutter has closed 24,541 issues, merged 17,039 PRs from 765 contributors. Along with Flutter 2.0, they also introduced Dart 2.12.

Using Flutter 2.0, now you can utilize a similar codebase for shipping native applications to 5 Operating Systems: Android, iOS, macOS, Windows, and Linux. So, let's see the Top features that came to Flutter with this update.

Web Support for Flutter

One of the most exciting features was Web Support for Flutter. Flutter Web is stable now. Just like we run our app on emulators, we can now also run it as a web app.

Being in the Stable version, we don't need to switch the Flutter version for trying Web Support. It's available on the Flutter Stable channel itself. Flutter supports HTML renderer and CanvasKit renderer.

Dart 2.12 with Support for Sound Null Safety

Flutter 2.0 also brought Sound Null safety concept for Dart. Sound null safety can reduce cringe null reference exceptions. Null Safety in Dart can be simply explained as:

"All variables are considered as non-nullable unless we tell they are." So, there's no null by default.

Desktop Support for Flutter

Similar to the web, Flutter has also extended its support to Desktop applications. Desktop support allows you to compile Flutter source code to a native Windows, macOS, or Linux desktop app.

Flutter’s desktop support also extends to plugins—you can install existing plugins that support the Windows, macOS, or Linux platforms, or you can create your own.

The flutter release also enables smoother resizing for Windows and macOS. Developers can also find information about beta channels if they wish to try the beta for the flutter desktop.

Google Mobile Ads

One of the features that were introduced was the Google Mobile Ads SDK beta version. Developers can now include inline banners and native ads along with the already existing formats.

This new SDK works well with AdManager and AdMob for providing different ad formats, incorporating native, banner, rewarded video ads, etc.

Latest iOS widgets

Flutter 2.0 also added new iOS widgets in the Cupertino widget design language. The new iOS widgets introduced were CupertinoSearchTextField, CupertinoFormRow, CupertinoFormSection, and CupertinoTextFormFieldRow.

CupertinoSearchTextField provides search UI in the Cupertino widget design language. CupertinoFormRow, CupertinoFormSection, and CupertinoTextFormFieldRow widgets provide iOS specific UI for dealing with form fields, rows, etc.

These were some of the Flutter 2.0 features I was excited about. To find about all the new changes in Flutter 2.0, visit Official Flutter documentation at https://flutter.dev/docs/whats-new.

My first Flutter Application

Rahul Mahesh — Wed, 25 Mar 2020 16:07:09 +0000

After an extensive bit of research and study, I made myself able to code my first Flutter application. The name of the application I did was Flutter Dice. It's a Flutter dice application. I took the help of Udemy and Youtube in making of this application.

As a newbie to Flutter it was the first time I used stateful widgets in Flutter. The application has two pictures one on the left and the other on the right side that have buttons embedded on them. And a set of six pictures representing different dice heads were given as an asset.

So when you click on a picture a button gets pressed. I made use of Dart Math library and used Math randomize to randomize the pictures on these buttons. When you click on one picture the left side and the right side picture would get randomize and a picture from the set of pictures that we gave in would appear in a randomized manner. No lags or pings would appear in the happening of this process. To the user, it would appear as if he's playing with a real-world dice.

I have learned a lot by making this application. I was able to use the knowledge of Math libraries, Stateful widgets and more in this simple application. And thus I created my first Flutter Application.. :)

DEV Community: Rahul Mahesh