What’s New in Flutter 3.7: A Comprehensive Guide

Flutter has just rolled out a new update that brings amazing features and improvements to the framework. Flutter 3.7 update is available now and you should be upgrading to it real quick. Today, we will be taking a closer look at the new update and exploring what it means for the future of flutter and for developers as well.

Recently on January 25th, at the Flutter Forward event, Google released the new version of Flutter where guests from Google, community members, flutter contributors, and all the tech geeks gathered to witness this action-packed event.

Flutter 3.7 is a stable release, meaning that it is suitable for production use and is supported by Google for an extended period of time. This release focuses on improvements to the framework’s performance, stability, and developer productivity. 

Let’s first give you a sneak preview of what this update has for us and later on we will be discussing the major additions in detail.

A Complete Overview of Flutter 3.7 Update

Flutter released its latest stable version, Flutter 3.7 on January 25, 2023. It came up with amazing new features and enhancements that are surely going to help developers build more intuitive apps. Let’s talk about some major moves one by one.

Take, for instance, Material 3. The comment buttons, the floating action buttons, and the icon buttons are way better than those in Material 2, the old one. The cards have rounded corners bigger than before. The same goes with the navigation drawer, it has rounded corners now it hadn’t in material 2. 

The bottom navigation bar and chip selection widgets have a more sleek and clean design now. Similarly, the switch widget also has the toggle buttons looking cleaner and more improved than those of material 2.

The next cool thing in Flutter 3.7 is the custom context menus. We can add a custom context menu anywhere in our application whether it’s a text selection toolbar or a widget. Moreover, the text selection has been improved within the scrolling context. A magnifying glass when we select text on iOS and Android. 

Furthermore, we can now add menu bars and cascading menus. You can also blur the platform view backgrounds. And one more good news is that the issue with the animation jank on iOS devices has also decreased.  

Want to hear more? Well, Flutter added a new package named the “FlexColorScheme” package. It has over 50 pre-built themes that you can easily customize. Interestingly, there is an online playground that you can use to test everything out. In addition to this, you can customize the widgets and copy the theme code and use it within your app directly. That’s really time-saving.

What’s New in Flutter 3.7 Update?

This year, flutter came up with some really useful features and awesome announcements that have made Flutter look different. You probably expected this update to be a complete disaster but Flutter proved us all wrong. There are some really cool features in Flutter 3.7 update you don’t want to miss. The additions are material 3, Dart 3, adaptive layout, impeller preview, and 3D support to name a few.

Let’s take a closer look at each of them.

Enhanced Material 3 Support

Material 3 has been added to the Flutter framework and several new widgets have been added as well as the old ones updated. There is a brand new Material 3 demo app that you can check out that has every single widget that’s supported. Basically, now you have more things to use in Material 3. 😉 

There is a FlexColorScheme Package added to Material 3 which has multiple pre-built themes. You can customize these themes according to your needs and copy the code to use in your app. Material 3 has elements, icons, buttons, cards, etc. having improved designs that offer a new perspective to the ones available in Material 2. 

If you want to include Material 3 in your application, you’ll need to set the useMaterial3 property to true in the theme data of your material app.

The Inception of Dart 3

Now, let’s talk about Dart 3. Dart 3 is a major release that is slated to be out around mid-2023. This version of the dart is going to be the most productive, portable, and approachable version of Dart till now. Surprisingly, you can relish the alpha version of Dart 3 as it’s not officially released yet. It’s called Dart 3A, the alpha version of Dart.

The Dart 3 will support pattern matching which has been a highly demanding feature for a long time. At times, you might need the function to return multiple values and types. This wasn’t possible back then. You would normally return values on a list tuple for a class. Now with Dart 3, you can return multiple values of different types using a new built-in collection type called records. 

Furthermore, we might need to destructure these values too. In that case, we can discard it by adding an underscore. In addition, we can also these patterns for matching the type and individual fields of each type. 

Impeller Preview

One of the most exciting additions that Flutter made in this update is the new Impeller, a graphics rendering engine. It is now available for preview on iOS on the stable channel. The Impeller’s performance is likely to meet or exceed that of the Skia renderer for most apps, and in terms of fidelity, Impeller implements all but a small number of rarely used corner cases. A future stable release of iOS will include Impeller as the default renderer, hopefully. 

There are still a few API gaps in Impeller, despite meeting the rendering needs of most existing Flutter apps on iOS. It’s possible that users may also notice minor visual differences in rendering between Skia and Impeller. If you notice any such differences, please do not hesitate to file an issue on GitHub.

While Flutter has made significant progress on a Vulkan backend for Impeller, with a fallback to OpenGL on older devices, Impeller on Android is not yet ready for preview. The team is actively working on Android support and we hope to have more information on support for desktop and web in future releases.

Custom Fragment Shaders

Another interesting feature to look out for in Flutter 3.7 is the fragment shaders. Flutter has extended its support for custom fragment shaders. It’s time to add enthusiastic effects to your apps and elevate the user experience to its fullest. Gather your gaming instincts and build amazing games with Flutter. 😉 

The Fragment Program API allows you to create rich graphics that are more amazing than the ones Flutter provides. However, Flutter will not limit its support to mobile only but also to web platforms as well.

Surprisingly, you will find plenty of effects and amazing animations that people are creating using shadders. Click here to see an example. 

3D Support in Flutter 3.7

Finally, Flutter also showed its profound interest in bringing 3D to the table. Although you can import any model you create with Blender, the Flutter team expressed that they are excited to bring full support as the initial performance they are getting is quite satisfactory. However, you can even hot reload the 3D models in Flutter to rebuild the experiences with Blender and see the results in the real-time app. 

Custom shaders and 3D are now available in Flutter, opening up the possibility of creating truly impressive graphical experiences.

Improved Efficiency Through Code Reduction

This has been in the discussion for quite some time now and the volume of code should be minified. This has been a major concern of developers. With an increasing user base, the platform needs to be less techy, fast, and lightweight in terms of code. 

For the same functionality, the Google Classroom team reduced code size by 66% with Flutter. Isn’t it incredible? 

Let’s move forward to the other advancements Flutter 3.7 has for us.

Google News Toolkit

The Flutter team at Google has collaborated with the Google News Initiative to develop the Flutter News Toolkit, a free and efficient solution for the news application development. The pre-built Flutter app template has been well-received by early adopters, who have reported significant time savings of up to 80% in comparison to traditional double-ended development on iOS and Android: thanks to Flutter’s cross-platform ability. 

With the increasing demand for diverse apps in the online marketplace, news apps are also becoming the most in-demand apps. Owing to this, Flutter has introduced a dedicated news toolkit for developers for building news apps offering some valuable functionalities. These include account creation, user onboarding, content feeds, monetization, search, and settings.

Seamless Integrations for Web and Mobile

As Flutter and Dart can be used to create an entire application, many projects require integration with other code. That is why seamless integration for web and mobile has become an important focus for developers.

In terms of web integration, Flutter announced a new feature called “element embedding,” which allows Flutter content to be seamlessly embedded within standard web elements such as <div>. This feature enables Flutter to function as a web component, seamlessly integrating with the web DOM and allowing for the use of CSS selectors and transformations to style the parent Flutter object.

Additionally, we are making significant changes to the js package to improve interoperability between JavaScript and Dart code. The js package allows for the annotation of any function in Dart code with the @JSExport attribute, enabling it to be called from JavaScript code, resulting in a seamless integration experience.

Conclusion

The Flutter 3.7 update brings a number of new features and enhancements that will help developers create more efficient and effective apps. The inclusion of the Dart 3 is surely something that’s gonna make a definite impact as it will make it easier for developers to test and iterate on their code. 

Additionally, the new features related to accessibility, localization, and performance will help to ensure that apps built with Flutter can be used by a wide range of users, regardless of their abilities or location. Overall, the Flutter 3.7 update is a significant step forward for the framework, and developers should take advantage of these new features to enhance their apps.

Thank you for standing by! We really appreciate your time and hope that you have good a better idea of what this new update has for us. 
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