After the first Beta release at last year’s MWC expo, Flutter 1.0 was officially released at Flutter Live 2018 in December 2018. At today’s MWC conference in Barcelona, Google officially released version 1.2 of the Flutter cross-platform UI framework. The biggest change is the introduction of support for Android App Bundles, the latest technology for efficiently packaging Android Apps and creating live apps. The framework also lays the foundation for developers to accept in-app payments and adds a number of Web-based tools.

Here are some updates to Flutter 1.2, including:

Improved Material and Cupertino widget set

The team has been working on improving the Material and Cupertino widget sets. Developers now have more flexibility in using Material widgets. For the Cupertino widget, they’ve added support for floating cursor text addition on iOS. This can be triggered by pressing the keyboard hard or long pressing the space bar.

Support for Android App Bundles

Flutter 1.2 supports Android App Bundles, a new upload format that contains all compiled code and resources for your application. This format helps reduce the size of applications and supports new features such as dynamic delivery of Android applications.

Dart 2.2 SDK is supported

This release includes the Dart 2.2 SDK, which was also released yesterday. Dart 2.2 has significant performance improvements, faster ahead of time compilation, and can be used to initialize the literal language of collections. It also introduces Dart Common Front End (CFE), which parses Dart code, performs type inference, and converts Dart to a lower-level intermediate language.

The Flutter 1.2 update includes a number of general stability and performance updates, including the latest Dart 2.2 SDK (by default, the Flutter application is written in Google’s Dart language). In addition, the team says they are actively improving support for iOS. Support floating cursor text editing and so on.

While Flutter has always focused on mobile, the team has also recently started talking about building desktop applications using the framework. To this end, new keyboard events and mouse hover support were introduced in version 1.2. A technical preview version of Project Hummingbird (which will promote the Web version of Flutter) will also be available in the next few months.

For the new tools, it’s worth noting that Google has built Flutter support into Android Studio and added tools to Microsoft’s increasingly popular Visual Studio Code. It is also building a new Web-based programming tool, Dart DevTools. They run locally and include the widget inspector, timeline view, source-level debugger, and logging view.

Other Updates

Flutter 1.2 also supports a wider range of animation easing features inspired by Robert Penner’s work. The team has set the stage for desktop-level operating systems by adding new keyboard events and mouse hover support.

The Plugin team for Flutter has added some changes to Flutter 1.2 to support the In App March 19 plugin. In addition to these updates, they also fixed some bugs for the video player, WebView and maps.

In addition to Flutter 1.2, the team also released a preview of Dart DevTools, a set of performance tools for Dart and Flutter. Some of the tools in the suite, including The Web Inspector, Timeline view, and others, are now ready to install.

The advantages of Flutter now, I think, are as follows:

  1. If we want to run applications on Google’s new system in the future, we can write Flutter correctly. Of course, recent reports suggest that Fuschia supports ART natively, so Android apps should work as well. But I think it’s better to just go on the Flutter.

  2. Dart. Learning Flutter allows us to master a new language. Buy one get one free.

  3. Flutter naturally supports ios-style controls, called Cupertino, so that we can have one design and one code running on two systems.

  4. The process of learning Flutter will change the thinking of mobile app development. After all, there is only one activity. It works like a game engine, drawing at 60 frames per second.

  5. Hot reload. Greatly accelerated our development efficiency. Try it. You’re gonna love it.

  6. Flutter provides method channels to Android and iOS. In fact, we can only develop the UI with Flutter. Other underlying logic can encapsulate the lib package of Android and iOS. Writing back to method channel directly from Rx encapsulation is also a new development mode.

  7. Better performance, better compatibility, more fun to develop, that’s the programmer’s life. And Flutter can satisfy.

To read more

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Build Flutter with Android Studio

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It’s not just technology that’s gained here!