Technology Tussles

One of the problems of learning new languages is that the majority of example code shows only the simplest use cases. With Flutter particularly I have found that the samples in the documentation and answers available on Stack Overflow are built to solve specific single widget needs rather than being coded for reusability. When you are building a larger app, however, you need to be thinking not just about how to get the job done, but how maintainable it will be in the long haul. As we… (more)

As part of my flutter journey I have been updating an app I wrote a few years ago, and applying some dynamic themes to it. In part one (Styling Flutter – Nightmare in Themesville) we looked at how to use the ThemeData object to apply a dynamic dark theme to light theme switch. In this post I will explore a few changes that have come along with Material 3 and a couple of gotchas that I have encountered in the process. The first and most obvious change… (more)

Following on from my last post about the potential pitfalls of Flutter themes, let’s look at some of the benefits. Looking at articles on Medium and answers on StackOverflow it seems that a lot of people fail to grasp the power of themes, and apply styles in an ad-hoc fashion at the widget or property level. This is fine for simple apps, but as app complexity grows it reduces code readability becomes increasingly difficult to maintain. What happens if you decide that all of your headings are… (more)

One of the great things about Flutter is how quickly you can progress with a project. Everyone says it. Flutter development is fast. Except when it isn’t. Where it comes unravelled for me is when I try and apply themes to my project. I’m a big fan of generic code. Declare something once, use it everywhere. On the face of it that is what themes are supposed to do. I can create an entry to decide the colour, or size of an icon by declaring it once… (more)

In my previous post I created a sliding number widget using Flutter CustomPainter. In order to use this widget in action, there are two more remaining tasks. The first is to group several of the NumberSlideWidgets together in a single widget and the second is to add the timer. Firstly we’re going to create a new widget called NumberSlideGroupWidget and pass in several parameters. Three of the these parameters you will recognise as being the same ones we passed in to the NumberSlideWidget: magnitude, color and contents.… (more)

I’ve been experimenting a bit with Flutter animations and wanted to create a timer widget which displays the time in seconds, and updates by rolling up or down. Extending Custom Painter After a bit of research I decided to extend the CustomPainter object to draw the number elements for the timer. The first step is to pass in some parameters to the custom painter which we will use to calculate the dimension, position, colour and contents of the square. Next we can create a method to draw… (more)