Monday 10 December 2018

Google has Unveiled Flutter 1.0

Google unveiled the Flutter 1.0 at an event at the Science Museum in London, UK. The Product Manager Tim Sneath introduced Flutter 1.0 to the enthusiastic developers.

What is Flutter? 


Flutter 1.0 is a cross-platform portable UI toolkit. It is an app engine that brings software development kit (SDK) out of beta.

Since 2015, it was undergoing various stages of development. Several of the beta versions were out last year and a preview of Flutter saw the release this summer.

It allows developers to build apps that can work on Android and iOS from a single codebase.

Flutter was designed by Google so that there could be a better collaboration and rapid development between the developers and coders. It is powered by Skia 2D graphics engine.

Material Design widgets which would look nice on both, Android and iPhone devices, will be powered by Google’s Dart platform. It will enable compilation to native 32-bit and 64-bit ARM code for Android and iOS. With the ‘stateful hot reload’ feature, you get quick visual results without any need to restart, thus saving time and increasing productivity. According to Google, the development cycles are three times more productive.

Flutter, being an open source, with a BSD-style licence, allows contributions from developers all over, since there are plenty of third-party plug-ins and widgets ready to be tried out.

Ashley Narayanen told Computer Business Review that even though it has the ability to target more than one platform which is not a new concept, the others being Xamarin, Cordova and React Native, it is a product of Google and not a third party component.

The other point to be noted is that Flutter is slated to be the main framework for the next-Gen operating system, Fuschia.

Though the Xamarin framework offers a native experience, there are still problems in cross-platform targeting since a complete 100 percent of the components cannot be used across both the Android and iOS platforms.

It has been designed to support Google’s ‘Material’ design language as well. Since there is heavy use of shadows and other effects, one can use the native hardware graphics acceleration on both the Android and iOS platforms. With the result it is capable of handling such workloads.

Many Big Companies are using Flutter


Big companies like Alibaba, Groupon, Tencent and others are developing and shipping apps with Flutter.

The mobile payment service Square announced two new Flutter SDKs whereby accepting payments for goods and services would become easier with Flutter. It could be done by using a Square payment reader or payments within the mobile app developed on the platform.

Animators 2Dimensions announced the use of ‘Flare’, a tool that enables designers to create animations which could be embedded into a Flutter app and manipulated with code. With Flare, there is no need to design in one app, animate in another and convert everything to a device-specific assets and code.

With Flutter, app design is radically simplified. Google made an announcement that they would be experimenting with running Flutter on the web under the codename, Hummingbird.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.