Technology Tussles

I recently needed to create a reusable Audio Player for a Flutter App I was working on. After a bit of research I decided to use the Just Audio plugin. As is often the case I found that the documentation was useful for standalone implementations, but not entirely helpful for reusability. The first step is to include Just Audio in the project as follows. Once this was done I created a simple object to play an audio file from a URL as follows The audio length variable… (more)

Recently I decided to add a default tab bar to my app in flutter. This is relatively straightforward to achieve using the following And this yields a tab bar with two pages which looks like this: Following on from my posts about using Themes in Flutter, we can now start to style the tab bar using the Theme parameter under MaterialApp. In the following snippet the indicator size changes the underline for the selected tab to span the whole width of the tab, whilst the label style… (more)

Recently I wanted to horizontally scrolling ListView to display a number of panels. This is relatively easy to achieve, but there were two things that I did not like about it. As it turns out both of these issues are also very easy to fix. First up, calculating the panel dimensions can be done by using a media query to get the screen width. Dividing the screen width by the minimum width of a panel and its margins gives us how many panels to display for a… (more)

Today I needed to share a timer between two widgets. A quick search revealed that the way to go was to use Provider. So, as usual I looked for a good example of how to go about it. I didn’t actually find one, so instead I took a look at the official documentation (https://pub.dev/packages/provider). Unfortunately, as is often the case the readme there is written from the perspective of assuming that you already know what to do. As of today there is more text telling you how… (more)

Having successfully run a couple of Flutter Apps on Android devices and the iOS Simulator (from AndroidStudio), I was not expecting there to be much of a problem getting my App running on iOS. Unfortunately as soon as I tried to run my code from XCode I hit an error A quick search revealed a large number of possible solutions most of them either not obviously relevant or not applicable to Flutter. Looking into the XCode error I found that it was located in a generated source… (more)

In my previous post I looked at creating a reusable popup menu in flutter and applying a flexible theme from ThemeData. After a bit of testing I’ve uncovered two minor wrinkles. The first is that the icons in my PopupMenuItem don’t take their style from iconTheme as I had anticipated. Instead, for some unknown reason they seem to inherit their colour from the foregroundColor attribute of AppBarTheme. I don’t know if this is a bug or an intentional decision – but it is slightly frustrating. Fortunately it… (more)