What’s New in Flutter !

Google has created quite a buzz with the roll-out of synchronous updates in Flutter 1.9 & Dart 2.5, it’s developer tool for building Cross-platform apps at Chinese Developer Conference in late ’19 attracting developers around the globe to adapt flutter . Flutter’s newest version allows developers to write for mobile, desktop and web with the single codebase..

Flutter 1.9 & Dart 2.5 has come up with a lot of advancements from their previous version updates to strengthen their app development process and Apparently, The reason why flutter is creating quite a Stir Nowadays.The Major revelation though from all being the Successful Integration of the Flutter Web Support to the main Flutter Repository and Ml integration.

Still Unaware of the Recent Updates , Let’s Go!

Quick Keynotes of Update :

• Flutter 1.9 Version will allow mobile app development companies to create mobile, web and desktop apps from Single Codebase.
• Flutter 1.9 include support for iOS 13 and macOS Catalina.
• Dart Programming Language 2.5 version includes more support for calling C code and superior code completion.
• Google Updated the Dart Language by integration of ML Autocomplete.

What’s New in Dart 2.5 : Supercharged development?

• Dart has been updated to version 2.5 ,the Dart SDK brings a technical preview of ML Complete, Google’s take on machine learning-powered automatic code completion. It also includes the ‘Foreign Function Interface’ for calling C code directly from Dart which provides machine learning-powered code completions for the IDE.
• New language defaults: New projects default to Swift instead of Objective-C and Kotlin instead of Java for iOS and Android projects respectively.

Default Language:
Swift => Objective C
Java =>  Kotlin

• Suppport for Flutter Web: Upgrade your Flutter from the master or dev channel, so that you can target the web with the latest experimental version of Flutter .Support for web output with Flutter is still at an alpha phase, but this release represents a major step forward towards enabling Production support for web development with Flutter. It include a flag to tell if an app is running on web (KIsWeb) right now .To view commonly asked questions and answers, see the web FAQ.

Building a web application with Flutter

To add support to an existing flutter project , run the following commands in the terminal of your project package:

Download the Flutter SDK:

Currently, you need either the master or dev channel of the Flutter SDK for web support. If you have the flutter tool installed already , run the following commands to install latest version :

 $ flutter channel dev
 $ flutter upgrade

The flutter upgrade command fails when “origin” points to a personal fork. To nulify that enter the following:

cd <inside local copy of the flutter/flutter repo>
 git remote get-url origin
ssh://git@github.com/flutter/flutter.git

Use the config command to enable web support:

flutter config --enable-web

Once web is enabled, flutter devices outputs a device named Chrome.

flutter devices
1 connected device:

Chrome • chrome • web-javascript • Google Chrome 76.0.3809.100

After enabling web support, restart the IDE. You Should now see Chrome (web) in the device pulldown to ensure correct installation.

NOTE : Support for web output with Flutter is still at an alpha phase. Not recommended for production yet but you can always Try out!

Also, What’s New in Flutter 1.9 Version?

• Integrated Web Support with Main Repository of Flutter: With the latest version of Flutter 1.9, developers can have a Unified repository which makes it possible to develop applications for Mobile, Desktop and Web using the Single Codebase.
• Now when web developers Create a project, the framework would create a web runner using a minimal web/index.html file that bootstraps the web-compiled code and accomplish web development processing.
• The file would enable using either the Flutter CLI tool or IDE plugins so developers can edit and run flutter applications on the web. It’s built into the dart analyzer availed across dart-enabled editors, including Android Studio, IntelliJ, and VS Code.

For those keen to try Dart ML Complete, Google is recommending using the Flutter dev channel or the Dart dev channel.

• Support Of New Material Widgets: Flutter 1.9 brings you up a wide range of Features and Material components that can make your web app development process far easier and hassle-free aiming to pixel- perfect User-experience .
• Toggle Options: It offer a row of buttons and icons and have them as Single-selection or Multi-select options, as well as to require at least one selection also permitting none to be selected.
• Worldwide Multi-Language Support: Flutter now suppports 24 additional languages including :

• Selectable text : Making a text selectable is now posssible in this flutter latest version .Use SelectableText.Rich for rich texts .

SelectableText(
 'Making Selectable Text',
  textAlign: TextAlign.center,
  style: TextStyle(fontWeight: FontWeight.bold),
  showCursor: true,
  cursorwidth: 10
  cursorcolor: Colors.green
  cursorRadius:Radius.circular(5)
)

• Structured Error messages : Error message are now made much more developer friendly , credits to flutter team working exponentially diligently to make them more Concise , Understandable and Actionable.

• Added Support for iOS 13 And macOS Catalina:Google wants to make sure that Flutter is all ready to support the latest version of macOS. Flutter 1.9 added support for new Xcode build systems, enabling 64-bit support throughout the toolchain and simplifies the platform dependencies.

Note: Before upgrading to Catalina, you’ll need to upgrade to the Flutter 1.9.1 stable release the other order works, but you’ll see an error when you do it that way.

• Flavors introduction: flavors are introduced in flutter also now for all to define some build configuration and switch them if you want : Staging, Development, Release.
• Flutter build aar: new build command work exactly the same purposely as ‘flutter build apk’ or ‘flutter app bundle ’ but for plugins .
• Advancement in Toolchain: With the latest release of Flutter 1.9, new projects default to Swift instead of Objective-C and Kotlin instead of java .

For more details on upgrading to Flutter 1.9, including details on how to fix any breaking changes that you might experience as you migrate your code, check out the detailed Flutter 1.9 release notes.

Closing Thoughts

This year has been Quite Eventful for flutter and Dart enthusiasts as this has paved up paths for many to adapt early to this wondrous Framework.

Hopefully, this blog will help you in trying out the Advancements in flutter & Flutter for web early adding a Perfect competitive niche to your business from your Peers.

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