Recently, I discovered The Cat API. This API returns an image of a cat on which we can vote. Their front page shows a great example. As an owner of two adorable cats, I immediately knew that I had to create a simple app for this. Luckily with Flutter, this is a pretty simple thing to build! So what are we going to develop? First, we will display an image of a cat. Then, the user can swipe it to…
If you are anything like me, you love to start a lot of side projects. As a software developer, it is easy to start with a lot of different projects. If you know how to program, your options for side projects are infinite. However, if you are even more like me, you left most of those projects on a graveyard. With COVID-19 around, the chance is that you have more time due to less travelling, no social meetings, no sports.…
Last year I published my first app on the Google Play Store. The road there was bumpy, starting many years ago to publish a simple game. It took multiple breaks and restarts. Most of them because I thought too simple about some of the basic parts during app development. However, I also learned a lot from it and will probably not make the same mistakes again. I will discuss some of the pitfalls I fell into. Dealing with different screen…
Asynchronous operations are in almost every application that works with a backend. Whether it is GraphQL, Rest, or anything else, you have the same pattern. You start the request, and you wait till the request is finished before you show the data. In Flutter, Riverpod provides us with the FutureProvider. With the FutureProvider, the UI can deal with this synchronously. The FutureProvider will let the Widgets know when the data is ready or when the call failed. Setup the Project Before we can…
Testing your Widget is important during Application Development. When it grows more complex, it becomes more work to test everything manually. Having tests for your widgets makes sure that the Widgets behave as we expect them to. This saves time when developing new features. In the last blog post, we already showed how to do this with Flutter Hooks. In this blog post, we are testing our Flutter Riverpod example. Setup the project Before we can start with coding, we…
Testing your Widget is important during Application Development. When it grows more complex, it becomes more work to test everything manually. Having tests for your widgets makes sure that the Widgets behave as we expect them to. This saves time when developing new features. This way, you do not have to test all other features again. In this blog post, we will describe how to create tests for your Widgets that contain Flutter Hooks. Setup the project Before we can…
We are going to show another example of Riverpod. This time we will create Tic Tac Toe. As shown earlier, we can easily create Tic Tac Toe with animation in Flutter. However, the state management was all over the place. In this blog post, we will show a better way to manage the state with Riverpod. Secondly, we are going to show another example of Flutter Freezed. Immutables can greatly help with reducing errors in your code, and it works…
There are times when immutable objects can make your life a lot simpler. Freezed is here to simplify working with immutable’s in Flutter. As they say: yet another code generator for unions They promise simple syntax without compromising the number of features. Before we start let’s take a quick look at what exactly is an immutable object. An object whose state cannot be changed after construction But why would you want to work with immutable’s? This is a question…
With Riverpod, we can extract the state management from the Widgets. However, this also means that the Widget has no control over the value changes. When we want to start an animation when the value changes, we have to look for updates to handle the animation in the Widget. In this blog post, we will show you three different animations based on value changes. After writing about animations in Flutter and Riverpod it was about time to combine both! Setting…
In the latest blog posts, I wrote about Flutter Hooks and the Provider to simplify state management in Flutter. We described how to simplify the modal dialog selector of categories with Flutter Hooks and with the Provider. However, there is also an option to combine both. Riverpod is a Provider but different! Riverpod has multiple benefits, such as supporting multiple providers of the same type, combining asynchronous providers, and adding providers from anywhere. Furthermore, it provides a way to combine…