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Flutter Development with Dart – Build Scalable Multi-platform Apps

The so-called browser war ended with Google’s launch of Flutter in December 2018, an open-source, UI framework for app development. Flutter development with Dart is becoming a more popular topic and demanding concern of Flutter developers. Flutter utilizes Dart, a programming language for the coding of Flutter apps. Dart’s syntax is much like JavaScript and it is an object programming language with the main concern of front-end development. Although this cross-platform framework is newer, it has become a leading priority of various companies like Cordova, React Native, and Xamarin. This powerful, general-purpose tool is highly in use today and you can find numerous Flutter applications on Play Store as well. This blog will provide everything you need to know about Flutter so you can set your Flutter development with Dart in motion. Flutter’s first stable version 1.0 created a splash in the world of application development. This was mainly because of one of the distinctive features of Flutter – use of a single codebase and programming language. Flutter development with Dart facilitate developers build a native app for both Android and iOS in a much simpler and faster way. Flutter’s development approach was also different from others, mainly because of its declarative UI writing. Before you get down to the development process, you first need to make sure you have a complete picture of the kind of UI in mind. For some developers, it improves clarity, but for others, it can create certain difficulties. Flutter’s framework consists of both an SDK – a software development kit – and its own widget-based UI library. You will find various reusable UI elements like buttons, sliders, and text inputs in this library. Dart Programming: A Language Review Google’s Dart is both a significant advantage and a notable drawback of Flutter development. The language was initially released in 2011 but it wasn’t until the launch of Flutter that the language became popular among developers. The inspiration came from other programming languages, mainly JavaScript and it is hence, Strongly Typed. You can use Dart to build just about anything on mobile, desktop, and web. When used for web applications, we have to compile Dart to JavaScript. In other words, Dart can semantically fit inside JavaScript, which is why it is simpler and easier to develop apps in Flutter. Whatever you write in Dart will compile to JavaScript. There is nothing innovative here, it is just a simple and predictable language with no special operators that could throw you off the loop. This is what makes Dart programming simple and productive. Use of Dart in Flutter: The Practical Advantages Some of the developers are quite skeptical about the use of Dart in Flutter. The language is growing steadily with time, but it is not one of the hot languages in use these days.  Does Google use Dart simply because it’s their language? That is not entirely true. Developers find learning Dart to be less of a hurdle as compared to other programming languages. Following are some practical advantages that come with the use of Dart. Flutter Pros and Cons When it’s time to develop applications, developers are most inclined toward cross-platform frameworks, but they are not restricted to Flutter only. However, within a year, Flutter usage has grown from 30% in 2019 to 39% in 2020. The users of React Native are coming towards Flutter, and this is because of the following advantages that Flutter has, over other frameworks.  Pros: Enhanced and Ideal Productivity: By using the same code base for your iOS and Android apps, you can save both time and resources. This productivity is further enhanced due to the feature of hot reload, which exists due to JIT compilation. Hot reloading allows you to catch a glance at the applied changes in real-time. The developer can simply pause the code execution, make the desired changes, and then continue where they left off. This feature not only speeds up the development process but also allows makes room for experimentation. Altogether, the entire process is faster, consumes fewer man-hours, and hence has more time-to-market speed. Ready-made Widgets: Flutter team works hard in providing you with a wide variety of ready-made widgets. They are also highly customizable and save time. Flutter also has a large set of Material and Cupertino widgets that can mimic the behavior of each design language perfectly. Achieve Native App Performance: One good thing about Flutter is that it does not rely on interpretation or any intermediate code representations. This allows similar to native app development. Through native code base and third-party integrations, developing gets easier. Skia – Flutter’s Rendering Engine: Most of the advantages mentioned above would not have been possible without Flutter’s high-performance rendering engine, Skia. Most of the famous application softwares like Chrome, Adobe, and Amazon Kindle use this graphic engine. Due to the use of Dart, Flutter compiles directly into the ARM code of mobile devices. Skia communicates with Flutter apps and in turn, Flutter accepts local events directly rather than compiling them first into JavaScript. With Skia, you can now virtually launch Flutter’s UI on any platform. This simplifies and speeds up the development process greatly. Powerful UI with Great Customization Potential: Flutter’s architecture allows the developers to build custom UI. You can customize whatever you see on the screen, regardless of the complexities. With custom designing, you can create applications that would look good on both iOS and Android by putting fundamentally lower efforts. Ready-to-use Features: Various applications make use of advanced OS-level features like Bluetooth, GPS coordinates, permission handling, and so on. With Flutter, many of these options are available through ready-to-use plug-ins supported by Google. Cons: While there are several advantages that the developers and businesses can take advantage of, there are some cons of Flutter too, which you need to be aware of before you start developing. Lesser Third-party Libraries: As mentioned earlier, Flutter is a relatively newer technology, due to which the volume of third-party libraries is limited. This reduces the speed

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Dart Null Safety in Flutter – A Complete Guide

In a Flutter app, dealing with null values in the code is always a hectic task. Several runtime errors can be caused if a function has a null value. Ultimately, it will cause app crashes. Dart Null safety is a feature that handles null values. Null safety is not originally a feature of Flutter but a specification of Dart language.  Firstly, the null safety in Flutter was introduced to the Dart programming language in July 2020. After its stable release in March 2021, the null safety feature was not only available for new code but also for migrating existing Flutter apps. In this blog, we will be giving you a complete overview of Dart null safety in Flutter. Flutter is one of the most reliable and broadly used frameworks when it comes to application development. It has several features that collectively make it a perfect choice for developers to build cross-platform applications. The code reusability, single codebase system, rich libraries, fast testing, native nature, and own rendering engine are some of its features that we can’t leave undiscussed. There is another interesting and most useful feature of Flutter that is null safety.  What is Null Safety? Dart null safety in Flutter is a feature that doesn’t allow a variable to have a null value. The variable can only have a null value unless you initialize with null to that variable. This feature reduces errors and app crashes which ultimately increases user satisfaction.   Interestingly, the null safety feature shows all the errors during the compilation of the code. You don’t have to wait until the runtime to identify the errors. The basic idea behind null safety is that all variables should be initialized with some value. This will reduce any runtime errors that can be caused due to the null value.   Additionally, this feature helps developers to find out where an error occurs. Whenever you see an error message like “Unhandled Exception: type ‘String’ is not a subtype of type ‘List<int>’ in type cast” then you should check whether the data is valid before using it. Fundamentals of Dart Null Safety in Flutter Three core design principles support the null safety. These are as:  Code should be non-nullable by default A variable will be considered non-nullable unless you explicitly inform Dart that it can be null. Since non-null is the most common API choice, we chose this as the default. To gain greater flexibility, you can defer some of that checking to runtime, but you must use a feature that is textually visible in your code to do so.  Adoptability of Null safe code  In the Dart, there is a lot of code present. You can easily migrate to null safety at any time you want to, and then incrementally, part by part. Dart null safety offers you complete freedom to switch to null safety. Whenever you want to move or whatever you want to move to null safety, you can do that readily. Moreover, a single project can have null-safe or non-null-safe code changes.      Fully Sound Null Code With the Dart null safety in Flutter, you can trust the type of system. If the type system determines that a variable is not null then it can never be null and vice versa. There is no possibility that null safety would show you any inaccurate results. This allows you to optimize the code compilation. Each variable requiring a value must be correctly initialized. Additionally, null Safety makes binaries smaller, reduces bugs, and executes faster. How does Dart null safety migration work? As Dart brings many useful and exciting features to Flutter SDK, you can perform several actions with it. Surprisingly, you can also migrate your application to null safety using a dart. Here is a quick go-through of the migration of an app to null safety. To migrate an application or a package to null safety, you need to follow five major steps. These steps are: 1. Make sure all dependencies are ready for migration While migrating your application to null safety, you need to make sure all the dependencies are ready for migration. You may need to the relocation migration again after transferring the appropriate code in case any of your dependencies change during the migration.  You might need to contact the flutter package developers if any of your dependencies are not null-safe. However, an app is ready to migrate only if it can upgrade its dependencies to the prerelease versions of the path and process.   2. Migrate using the migration tool You may require tools throughout the development process while building an app. These tools help you streamline the development process by performing certain tasks. Luckily, the migration tools are there to help you analyze the nullable attributes. Interestingly, you can add nullability cues to change the attributes of a device. However, it may affect the migration quality in one way or the other.   3. Static analysis of your migrated code You can execute the pub get command in your terminal to update your packages. This will allow you to evaluate your Flutter and Dart code statically. Following are the commands which you can run to analyze your migrated code for Flutter and Dart. 4. Make sure the tests pass During the migration of your app to null safety, ensure that all the tests pass. You may need to rerun tests if you modified your package code to only accept non-nullable variables. 5. Publication of null-safe packages As soon as the migration is complete and the tests are successful, you can publish the prerelease packages. As a compliment, you should publish your package to pub.dev which is a public repository. This will help other developers to reuse the code if it aligns with their needs and requirements. How to Enable Null Safety in Flutter? Although null safety is no more an experiment in Dart, you may still need to enable null safety. Moreover, you could also need to enable null safety because the previous version

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Web Application Development – All You Need To Know

Web application development has taken a huge spike in the last few years. It has now become more crucial for businesses to go online. Because these days, people prefer to perform most of their purchases, sales, and other stuff online. And when it comes to dealing with online platforms, a web application is a thing that can’t be left undiscussed. Web application development has a vital role in running a successful business online. There are different mediums from which a business can leverage and sell its products or services online. These include mobile apps, desktop apps, web development, eCommerce store development, etc. Alongside all these mediums, a web application also has a vital role in outshining a business to its maximum potential. There are different web application development companies offering a wide range of web application development services. You can rely on any web application development company or a freelance web application developer to get your app built. Choosing a web application development company could be a challenging task for you. But you can hire the right web application development company if you follow some proven ways. What is a Web Application? A web application is an internet-driven program that runs with the help of web browsers or web technologies. The data is stored on a remote server and you get to access web applications through web browsers, which usually a desktop or any mobile device comes with. These web applications are commonly eCommerce stores, webmail, online forums, text or photo editors, etc. What is Web Application Development? Web application development is the process of creating an online program that’s designed to work with a browser instead of being installed on a computer. This means that users can access them through a web browser without having to download anything. You can also access web applications through mobile phones. How to Build Web Apps?

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Hiring A Mobile App Developer? Here’s What To Look For

Did you know users downloaded approximately 36.8 billion apps from the Google Play Store and App Store in the first quarter of 2022? This elicits the massive potential for mobile apps and a mobile app developer ultimately. In this era of digitalization, businesses must be mobile. Having a mobile app developed for your business can drive you a drastic amount of traffic and a user base that you can’t even imagine. According to research, total user spending on mobile apps will reach almost 233 billion USD by 2026. This would be an incredible increase of over 76 percent as compared to total consumer spending registered in 2021. Owing to this, mobile apps can also generate massive revenue for your business. This will require you to implement several strategies. You can give “how do free apps make money” a read and you’ll have a clear idea of how mobile apps make money. What is a Mobile App Developer? A mobile app developer is a computer software engineer who works closely with the development framework and builds an app that can be run on different devices like mobile, tablets, smartwatches, etc. The mobile app developer has a keen knowledge of different programming languages that are required to code within the app. In an app development company, developers work alongside a team containing a group of professionals with their respective tasks. The team may include graphic designers, data analysts, and other software experts who work collaboratively with each other. This collaborative work environment results in an effective workflow and work process. If you’re thinking of getting your mobile application developed, you should hire a mobile app developer and start the development of your mobile app right away. How to Hire a Mobile App Developer? There are several platforms from which you can find a mobile app developer to build a mobile app for your business. You can either hire a mobile app developer from a freelance marketplace or you can hire a mobile app developer on a dedicated resource basis from a mobile app development agency. Let us get to know in detail how you can hire a mobile app developer. There are three different ways to hire a mobile app developer. These are as follows: Hire a Freelance Mobile App Developer One of the best ways to fulfill your mobile app development needs is to hire a freelance mobile app developer. Freelance marketplaces are trustworthy platforms when it comes to hiring any service provider. The terms and conditions of the marketplaces have led to a favorable and secure working environment. You will find plenty of freelancers providing services of their expertise on freelance platforms such as Fiverr, Upwork, Freelancers, Guru, People Per Hour, and others. These platforms have strict guidelines for sellers that let them stick to clients’ requirements and deliver the work up to par. How do clients make payments to freelancers? There are different payment methods that you can choose to make payments to freelancers when they deliver the work. You can either pay them at a fixed price model, milestones, or hourly basis. In the fixed-price model, the client presents its requirements for a task and the budget for it. The freelancer analyzes the extent of the project and then presents the time required to complete that task. Moreover, the client and the freelancer can negotiate pricing and project duration. After the agreement from both sides, the project starts and ends within the agreed timeframe and budget. On the other hand, in the milestone model, the client and freelancer agree on a milestone to achieve for a specific amount of payment. As the freelancer does the work that has been decided for the milestone, he can deliver the work to the client. As the client accepts the delivery, the freelancer gets that amount. Another model of making payments to freelancers is paying them on an hourly basis. The client agrees to an hourly rate bid made by a freelancer to complete the project. After all, the freelancer gets the amount for the number of hours they work for that client. In-House Mobile App Developers If you have bundles of dollars ready to spend on the development of your mobile app and you know how to manage a team of mobile app developers, then this option is for you. Hiring several mobile app developers in-house definitely costs more than any of the other approaches to hiring a mobile app developer. Whenever you plan to hire an in-house team, you’ll need to cover the cost of several operations. This includes hiring new employees, training them, offering them different perks, and paying for their vacations. Despite being costly, hiring in-house mobile app developers could be the most effective way for building a mobile app. There are several benefits of hiring an in-house team of mobile app developers. Some of them are easier communication, better project understanding, and team coordination. This collectively makes the development process more effective. On the other hand, there are a few cons of hiring an in-house team of mobile app developers as well. These include; the high cost of hiring, high managing costs (equipment, vacations, etc.), and more time consuming. Outsourcing to Mobile App Development Team Another way to fulfill your mobile app development needs is to outsource your mobile app development projects. This is a great way to stay within budget while leveraging the skills of developers. There are a few drawbacks of outsourcing your app development projects as well. It could be language barriers or timezone differences that cause a communication gap that you won’t want to happen. You can only rely on an outsourcing company if it has a strong portfolio and is trusted by some other brands. Outsourcing your mobile app development projects has several pros and cons. The pros of outsourcing mobile app development projects include; reduced cost, smooth workflows, and quick time to market. On the other hand, the cons of outsourcing a mobile app development project are failure risk, communication

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Flutter Card Widget With Example | FlutterDesk

While building apps with Flutter, several UI/UX design elements collectively make your app more interactive. As the UI of your app defines its future, you should always value making the UI of your app as engaging as you can. This will increase the user retention rate, which is one of the major steps toward your app’s success. Dart provides ready-to-use material card classes that you can use to customize the visuals of the widget. The flutter card widget is a built-in widget in Flutter that helps you create design elements and add functionality to them. These cards make the application UI look more beautiful and easy to use. In this blog, we will get to know what card widgets in Flutter are and how these widgets work with an example. What is Flutter Card? The flutter card widget is an implementation of material design that includes buttons, expanding panels, animations, and much more. Material is a design system developed by Google that helps you build high-quality digital experiences for mobile, desktop, and web. The card can be a button, sheet, or box representing information related to a particular action or location. Creating a card in flutter is not a big deal. You just need to call the card constructor and then pass a widget as a child property. This will display the card and the action inside it. Let’s discuss the properties of the flutter card widget and explore it more clearly with the flutter card example. Related Post – disable back button flutter Properties of Card Widget Whenever we construct a card class in Flutter, it has the following attributes: borderOnForeground: This property requires a Boolean value as an input to decide whether to print the borders or not. clipBehavior: This property helps clipping the content inside the card, elevation: It takes the double value to decide the z-coordinate where the card should be positioned. color: This property assigns a background color to the card. shadowColor: It takes the color class as the object and assigns that color to the shadow. This color appears beneath the card and by default, the color is set to black. margin:  This property adds empty spaces around the card with the help of EdgeInsetsGeometry as the object. shape: This property specifies the shape of the card. For example circular border, beveled border, or stadium border. Flutter Card Example You can customize cards in Flutter by changing their attributes. Let’s have a look at an example for a better demonstration of the card widget in flutter. Result Conclusion Finally, you must have an idea about the cards in a flutter after going through this blog. FlutterDesk continues to help and encourage Flutter aspirants to learn newer development techniques and follow the latest development trends. Lastly, feel free to leave a comment and ask away any questions your mind is ticking.

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How Do Free Apps Make Money: Top Strategies To Start Earning

These days, smartphone usage has increased and the potential for the apps to generate massive revenues has also increased. You must be wondering how free apps make money. Well, several proven app marketing strategies could uplift the potential of monetizing your app. Mobile apps are a greater way for businesses to showcase their products or services and sell them right away. If you’re new to mobile app development and want to know how free apps can make money then this article is for you. You’ll get to know what possible approaches we can take to monetize mobile apps and start making money. Before we move further, be informed that there are more than 4.5 million apps available on the app store and play store, collectively. This signifies that the competition to enter the arena of apps is tough. There must be a unique selling proposition in your app that helps stand out in the ocean of other apps already available. You need to conduct thorough research on one particular idea and determine if it forecasts good results. It is better not to fall into scope creep during app development to avoid financial or any other losses. Moreover, validating your idea through an MVP is also a good approach to avoid scope creep. Let’s discuss what possible marketing strategies could be fruitful for your app to make money. Most Powerful Marketing Strategies

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Benefits of Flutter App Development | FlutterDesk

Flutter has been the utmost priority of developers to choose when it comes to selecting a framework for app development. It is much surprising to know the fact that flutter has gained exceptional popularity in such a short period. Since Google launched flutter 3 years ago, it was not that easy for any development framework to gain the developer’s interest. But due to the obvious benefits of flutter app development, developers can’t resist going with flutter for any of their app development projects. Mobile app development trends are evolving day by day. Similarly, the technologies are trying their best to find a way to distinguish themselves from others to build robust apps. There is no doubt that flutter possesses most of the features which are necessary for delivering the best development experience. Its single codebase for cross-platform development is one of the main reasons that it dominates other platforms, straightforwardly. Many businesses look forward to hiring a flutter developer to turn their ideas into real-world easy-to-use apps. Mobile phone users have grown extremely fast in a couple of years. There is no possibility that the potential of uplifting your business with mobile apps is going to end anytime soon. Let’s move forward to getting to know what flutter is and what are the benefits of flutter app development. What is Flutter? Flutter is Google’s launched development framework that has been around us since early 2015. Its stable release came out later in 2018 as a complete and ready-to-code framework. In simple words, flutter is a cross-platform development framework for building mobile, web, and desktop apps using a single codebase. Gone are the days when you had to write the code separately to move towards another platform. Flutter has transformed the development trend and laid a transparent, fast, and productive development experience. Flutter continues to improve the developer experience and introduces newer and better features with time. Benefits of Flutter App Development Fast Development The time required to finish the developing process is the stakeholder’s major concern when it comes to mobile app development. The time required to complete a project depends upon the development framework and the resources it would take. There are a couple of useful features in Flutter that collectively make development fast. One of the main features in this regard is the hot reload feature. It works by injecting updated source code files into the running Dart Virtual Machine (VM). The Virtual Machine updates the classes with the new versions of fields and functions. After that, the Flutter framework automatically rebuilds the widget tree, allowing you to quickly view the effects of your changes. Moving forward, consider how much it would help the developer-designer relationship. For example, your designer can prompt your Flutter engineer to make changes, such as changing the position of a button. The developer can make the changes in the code and see the outcomes right away. Similarly, he will be informing the designer if the button is in the right position or not. There is no need to wait longer for the runtime, which causes delays in the consequences. Single Codebase for Multiple Platforms One of the most distinguishing and reliable benefits of flutter app development is its cross-platform development. Before flutter came into the game, it was much more time-consuming and expensive to build apps for more than one platform. Flutter is a single codebase framework, which means that you have to write the code only once. And this code will be compatible with all other platforms (mobile, web, desktop). You’ll not find any other framework that offers code reusability and allows you to write just one codebase. This cuts down development time to a much greater extent and ultimately reduces cost. Moreover, flutter has a lot of ready-to-use customizable widgets, unlike other platforms. It takes a lot of time and effort to create widgets and implement them in the app. With Flutter, you don’t have to worry about creating the widgets as there are plenty of widgets already available in it. You can select a relevant widget and readily implement it in the app saving considerable time and struggle. High-Performance Apps Application performance is probably one of the key features when building a good UX. In earlier updates, Flutter has improved rendering performance by 50 % on new iOS devices. Additionally, it reduced memory consumption by over 70%. This fact displays the great picture of the benefits of flutter app development over another software development kit (SDK) you choose to follow. It is due to the native app development of Flutter that the apps built with this framework have high performance. One of Flutter’s benefits is that it doesn’t rely on creating manual widgets. The application already has built-in widgets which minimize any performance errors in the process. Flutter does not need a JavaScript barrier to interact with native components and has a powerful rendering engine, ‘Skia’. Flutter shows comparatively high performance if we compare it with other frameworks like Ionic or react native. Best for MVPs MVPs have become a must-have asset for every startup as they can help you validate your idea and possibly get you the initial funding for your project. Flutter encourages MVP development as an open-source framework. With Flutter’s increased popularity and pace of the development process, app development becomes simplified. MVPs are small, basic app versions with minimal functionality and essential features that are easy to build and launch. We build MVPs to test the concept, collect the first feedback, and unlock growth opportunities to make a better app in the next iteration. Without an MVP, businesses can’t have an idea of how effective and productive their business could be. As it is useless to move to development blindly, you need to have an MVP developed. Flutter app development is a great choice for MVP development as this SDK is extensive, easy to understand, and delivers excellent apps. Customizable Widgets As discussed earlier, Flutter offers more than 390 widgets to help developers throughout the

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