DEV Community: Sachin Dahal

Flutter 2.10: Flutter Stable Support for Windows and Other Updates

Sachin Dahal — Fri, 04 Feb 2022 01:20:38 +0000

Since the day of the release of Flutter, it’s been the game-changer for cross-platform app-making languages and has a very huge expansion. flutter developers are also expanded and by the great support of maintainers, the platform of making apps by flutter is expanding correspondingly too. According to the report, there are nearly half a million apps that use Flutter and now in the very latest update of Flutter i.e. Flutter 2.10, comes with stable support making it developers easy to create Windows apps as like creating for Android and iOS platforms.

Since Flutter 2.0 was released, it has supported Windows, Linux, and macOS in beta but Windows has become the first one to get stable support. Google Flutter has also updated the common packages to support Windows too like file_picker, camera, and shared_preferences. Those packages were already there for windows support for a while but from this update, Google marks them as the production-ready. Several plugins are also released/updated in the pub.dev that expressed the Microsoft fluent design system for windows app where packages like fluent_ui, fluentui_system_icons, and flutter_acrylic help to get us those.

Since the stable support for windows is great news for Flutter 2.10, there are other updates too regarding Performance, Android, iOS & Web updates, Material 3, Flutter DevTools, and so on. It’s common that the Flutter team is always looking after the performance enhancements and reducing the memory usage part.

For iOS, a smoother keyboard popup is introduced and there is nothing implemented on it, it’s just normal and you don’t need to do anything for it.

For Android, now the flutter default supports the latest version of Android i.e if Android Version 12 and API level 31. In addition to it, they’ve also enabled multidex support automatically and no need to add it to the specific build_types. Only passing--multidex flag while creating the apk or appbundle is okay and the app will support multidex. another beautiful update here is, the headache for many developers like me i.e. the Gradle error messages and now it will be easy to figure out and fix it. Flutter will show the steps to fix such mistakes in the Flutter Fix section. This section will also appear when you install any of the packages and it requires the higher Android SDK version.

For the Web too, they have focused on the performance with the introduction of a new Link widget. By this, if there are any links on the Flutter web app, it won’t be a hassle to implement it anymore with any custom builts. Plus the Flutter team also says to implement this optimization in other widgets in the future too.

Another beautiful update is about Material 3, here developers can generate an entire color scheme based on a single seed color. Also, they’ve introduced a new flag in ThemeData i.e. ThemeData.useMaterial3 which will switch all of the app components to the Material3 look. And they have also added 1000+ new material icons.

A new Color feature improvement is also made on vs code and we can switch to their Pre-release version of both Flutter and dart plugins in vs code. So, as the Flutter team mentioned during the Flutter 2.8 release to remove the dev channel in the next update and this time flutter completely removes the dev channel from Flutter to simplify the channel choices (tbh, while I started Flutter, it was a real problem for me to choose a flutter channel :D). Flutter docs and the code examples have also been updated.

As we have already discussed the major updates here and if you want to view the updated docs briefly, you can visit the mentioned official source links here:
📚 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-0B_Vfc9qM&t=0s
📚 https://medium.com/flutter/whats-new-in-flutter-2-10-5aafb0314b12
📚 https://medium.com/flutter/announcing-flutter-for-windows-6979d0d01fed

Along with Flutter 2.10, there is an update for Dart too, and it’s Dart 2.16. There are not many updates about the language features but they’ve done plenty of bug fixes and support for identifying the platforms. Also, our always opened and well-known tab, the pub.dev also has got a new search experience with this update. You can check out the search part at https://pub.dev/packages

❤ Thanks for being up to here and reading this article ❤

If you noticed anything wrong, please let me know about it. I would feel really happy to improve it.
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10 Free Popular APIs For Your Upcoming Projects

Sachin Dahal — Thu, 24 Jun 2021 11:39:25 +0000

As a beginner, we all always have thought of mastering our skills by taking it to the top. After clearing the basic levels of completing static projects, it can be whether a website or mobile applications, a little advanced topic will come in its way. Using APIs in a project is one of those.
Here, I've mentioned the curated list of the top 10 free and popular APIs for your upcoming projects. All the mentioned APIs will help you to be a better developer by integrating them all in your next projects. You can use all these APIs as practicing material or even in your commercial projects if it is required.

OpenWeatherMap API

Open weather map provides the current weather information for any location including over 200K cities. OpenWeather API is one of the very useful API for the programming beginners who wants to know about what are and how to use REST APIs in their any projects. You can check their official site for brief information about their API services.
Marvel Comics API

Marvel comics API is the world's greatest comics API. This API helps the developers to create extraordinary websites and applications using their API data from the 70+ years of the Marvel age of comics. You need to first signup and get their API Key, then you'll be able to use their API by following their certain guidelines.
Also, to the current period of time (June 2021), the Marvel API suite and a maximum of its portal are in the beta phase which marks this as an evolving project.
Chuck Norris Joke API

One of the best free and popular APIs to boost your API integration skills. This API is really made from the inspiration of famous actor Chuck Norris. This action star practically has his second career inspiring memes and jokes over the internet. After a simple request in /random route, you can retrieve a random joke as a response in JSON format.
Jokes can be retrieved by searching via category, list of available categories, free text search, and so on. You can head over to the official site and have a look at the various supported APIs.
TMDb API

The Movie Database (TMDb) is a huge database of various movies and shows which is made by the community. Data of each movie here is added by the amazing community of the TMDb since 2008. Almost in every programming tutorial, the usage of TMDb API is really popular. This site provides a variety of API routes that serves the various movies on the basis of category, trending, highest-rated, and so on. You can definitely go to the official site and analyze the API and also could use it if you feel really interesting.
Cat Facts API

Cat facts API is the freely available API to use in your upcoming projects without any cost which any amount of request.
Frankfurter API

Frankfurter API is one of the best APIs to use in your next project. You can easily grab all the API usage concepts by heading upon its well-written documentation then you're good to go.
This API tracks foreign exchange reference rates published by the European Central Bank. The data refreshes around 16:00 CET every working day.
Free-To-Play Games API

Free-To-Play Games has a collection of various categorized games which provides the free API to get those lists of games by their defined API links. FreeToGame API is available for everyone to use without any restrictions. This API is free and easy to use and also the main thing is that it doesn't require any key to send the request.
COVID-19 API

One of the best COVID-19 data providers. To date, 504M+ amount of requests is served by this API. This provides the latest COVID-19 related data which gets updated multiple times a day. This API is free and can be used at whatever you want to make without any restrictions which respond back all of its data in JSON format for easy integration to the developers.
TheMealDB API

One of the most famous API for providing the best meal recipes data which is an open and crowd-sourced database contributed by peoples from all around tee world. The particular API and the site will remain free at a point of access. You can check the official API documentation for the clear usage of the API in your upcoming projects.
Github API

A very famous REST API to use in any of your projects. With this API you can easily get all the necessary data by adding your request to the parameter or given endpoints. After using this API, you can easily grab the concept of using REST API in your incredible websites or applications.

Well, these all are the list of Top 10 Free and Popular APIs For Your Upcoming Projects. There are still a lot freely available APIs which you can use as a practicing material at the beginning phase and can also use for the releasing purpose. Only thing you need to do is more and more research in the inernet.

Happy Coding
Sachin Dahal