Flutter for Designers Part 2

Build a cross platform app for iOS and Android

Flutter is a relatively new toolkit that makes it easy to build cross-platform apps that look gorgeous and is easy to use. By utilizing a platform's native components we'll build an app that can run on both iOS and Android that will look and feel like it was developed natively. Furthermore we'll see how with one single codebase, Flutter provides us with native performance, hot reload for fast development, and access to beautiful, native components.

About this Course

Continuing on from the previous Flutter for Designers course, this course has a heavier emphasis on using Firebase API's to combine Firebase and Flutter. There will be a lesser emphasis on creating front-end Flutter UI and more emphasis on how to build functional applications capable of being shipped to the App Store. A review of the previous course and the Dart programming language will be very helpful. That being said, you will also be introduced to some new Flutter widgets and packages.

Requirements

This course is a continuation of Flutter for Designers Part 1. Therefore, please make sure you have taken the previous course in order to continue on with this course.

In this course, I am running macOS Big Sur, Xcode 12.4, and Android Studio 4.1.2. We'll be using Android Studio to develop our Flutter application. If you do not have the Flutter or Dart SDK installed on your system, check out this section from the previous course. For the most of this course, I was using Flutter 1.22. If you are using Flutter 2.0, read the section below.

A Note About Flutter 2.0

Halfway through the development of this course, Flutter announced Flutter 2.0, the biggest upgrade to Flutter since Flutter. The notable new features about Flutter 2.0 is that apart from iOS and Android, Flutter applications can now be built for the Web, macOS, Linux, and Windows. Furthermore, Flutter 2.0 includes some new tools, engine changes, and introduces null safety into Dart (a technique to help avoid bugs cause by not defining a variable). If you want more information on what's new, this Medium post by the Flutter creators is a worthy read.

The best part about this upgrade is that it works with all of the code we have written so far. Therefore, whether you are running Flutter 1.0 or 2.0, the above course should still be able to run completely fine. The only notable change you may notice is that you may need to upgrade the packages inside your pubspec.yaml file upon installation, but the code will remain the same nevertheless.