What’s New In Flutter 1.20?

Google, on August 5, 2020 has launched a version of Flutter 1.20 Stable. In the previous release, Google introduced substantial performance improvements, improved support for Metal on ios and new material widgets. With the new biggest release, Flutter 1.20 has resolved 5485 issues and merged 3029 pull requests. Flutter 1.20 release had 359 contributors from across the world and among them 270 were from the flutter community. Flutter 1.20 stable release includes performance improvements, some UI enhancements, update to the visual studio code extension, autofill for mobile text fields and so on. Each new release of Flutter brings with it increased usage and momentum. Google boasts that, now there are more than 90,000 apps developed with Google Play, which was 50,000 till April. And most of the growth comes from India,  which is now the top region for Flutter developers, Google says.

Let’s have a look at the new features and updates of flutter 1.20.

What’s New in Flutter 1.20? Updates & Features-

Performance Improvements For Flutter And Dart-

• Google Flutter 1.20 is improved with a performance fix for tree-shake-icons which are default when building non web apps and reduce the size of your app by removing icons that are not used. Icon font tree shaking is currently restricted to True Type Fonts  but can be lifted in the future.
• Janky animations can affect the overall app. It appears negatively in the first run due to a shady compilation jank. With new Skia Shading Language Shader warm-up, the shader compilation jank can be reduced  by 2 times.
• Flutter has improved mouse hit testing’s performance in web-based micro-benchmark by 15 times. As a result, Google has been able to add support for mouse cursors which will display in various commonly used widgets.
• Along with all these improvements, Google also enhanced the decoding speed and time of Dart’s UTF-8 Decoder. In UTF-8 decoding benchmarks, the company ahs measured improvements of nearly 200% for english text and 400% for chinese text on low-end ARM devices.

1. Autofill for mobile text fields-

One of the most requested features among developers is text autofill in Flutter apps. With the new Flutter 1.20 release, basic autofill functionality has been added. Now you do not need to ask your users to fill the data again that the OS has already collected. The text autofill feature is also brought for web apps too.

2. Interactive viewer widget-

Another new feature in Flutter 1.20 is interactive viewer. This new widget is designed to build interactive elements in your app like pan, zoom, drag ‘n’ drop and so on. The feature takes boundary margin, minScale, maxScale and any type of child property on which transformation is performed. Put your cursor on the property and you can drag n drop, zoom in out using the cursor. 

3. Updated DatePicker, TimePicker, RangeSlider, And Material Slider-

This new release includes many updated widgets to match the latest material guidelines. These include Slider and RangeSlider. DatePicker has been updated to include a new compact design as well as support for date ranges. And TimePicker has a completely new style.

4. New pubspec format for publishing plugins-

The pubspec.yaml has been removed in Flutter 1.20. So now you’ve to adopt the new pubspec.yaml format to update or publish new plugin. The old format did not support specifying which platforms your plugins support, and has been deprecated since Flutter 1.12.  The new pubspec.yaml format is now required for publishing new or updated plugins.

For clients of plugins, the tools understand the old pubspec format and will for the foreseeable future. Existing plugins on pub.dev using the legacy pubspec.yaml format will work as usual with Flutter apps for the foreseeable future.

5. Tooling metadata for all tool builders-

This is an update in Flutter 1.20 for developers creating flutter tooling. They have released a complete catalog of metadata for a 395 widgets. For every single widget there are parents, libraries and descriptions available in the Catalog and one icon metadata for material and cupertino icons. Icon metadata includes color mapping, values of the color and icon names and previews as well.

6. Typesafe platform channels for platform interop-

Because of increasing demand from Pigeon authors, google is experimenting the making communication between flutter and host platforms simpler and more secure for Add-to-App and plugins. To fulfill this need google has created Pigeon, a command line tool which uses Dart syntax to generate type-safe messaging code on top of platform channels without including extra runtime dependencies. 

With Pigeon, rather than manually matching method strings on platform channels and serializing arguments, you can call Kotlin/Swift/Objective-C/Java class methods and pass non-primitive data objects by directly calling Dart methods. Pigeon is mature enough that we can use it in video_player plugin.

7. Mouse cursor support-

Mouse cursor for desktop is one of the upvoted features of Flutter 1.20. Now you’ll get better, faster and stronger hit testing using your mouse cursor.

8. Updating import statements on file rename-

For visual studio code has a new feature- updating imports on rename. This new feature automatically updates import statements when files are renamed or removed. Right now, it just works for single files, but the support for multiple files will be announced soon.

9. Auto import change in VSCode-

Another improvement is support for auto import changes in Visual Studio Code. Means when you change the location of file from one folder to another, the import will automatically be changed.

Other important changes/updates-

Flutter 1.20 has lots of other new features and developer tools. These are some of few: 

• support for automatically updating import statements when files are moved or renamed in Visual Studio Code; and more.
• an updated Flutter plugins
• a new responsive licenses page available from the AboutDialog
• a new pubspec.yaml format requirement for publishing
• an updated Network page in Dart DevTools with support for web socket profiling

Final Words-

These are some new features and updates from new release Flutter 1.20. There can be few others too. Google says that Flutter 1.20 is the framework’s biggest release yet and is still working on implementing sound null safety support, new versions of Ads, Maps and WebView plugins, tooling support and so on.

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Flutter 1.12 features that will rule 2020

Flutter came up with its newest stable version Flutter 1.12 on December  11, 2019. Developers incline toward Flutter for its smart features and the latest Flutter 1.12 supports some efficient functionality and features. Since its Flutter 1.0 version released in December 2018, Google Flutter has been developing and now, it has made a 5 stable releases. Flutter developers team, included high level functionalities and also features in flutter framework with support  for Game Controller and Android App Bundles, and launch of RangeSlider control feature. Also, from event highlights, Flutter for web goes for the beta, support for Adobe XD, MacOS to Flutter plugin for supernova, designer, and significantly more has declared in the Flutter Interactive event. Know the basics of Flutter at- What is Flutter? An about the joy of flutter.

Before exploring what’s new in the Flutter 1.12 version, we should discuss what Ambient Computing is:

What is Ambient Computing?

Knowing the fact that we interact with various ‘internet-connected’ devices daily, the Flutter development team has chosen to provide an environment that makes all services accessible across all devices. They switched from the concept of ‘Write Once, Run Anywhere’ to Ambient Computing. Ambient Computing is characterized as the collective devices that can be treated as an extension of one another for delivering a seamless experience. With this concept, the developers will no further need to choose which device to focus before starting with Flutter application development. They can create user experience that fits to every one of the devices and platforms also– be it mobile, desktop, smart homes, embedded devices, or smart watches. Now, as the core Ambient computing vision for Flutter 1.12 is clarified, let’s go to the announcements.

What’s New in Flutter 1.12 Version?

1. Dart 2.7-

The basic change that this Flutter version is bringing is the release of Dart 2.7. This programming language update, will take the experience of working with Dart 2.5 to the next level, as Extension methods and Safe string handling capabilities. It will allow developers to do things like parse integers in a string, and prevent errors when variables have a null value.

2. Beta Web Support-

Flutter for web is one of the significant Flutter 1.5 features. It additionally got an upgrade in this update. The Flutter’s web support reached beta version; making it simpler for developers to use a Dart compiler and the Flutter architecture effectively.

3. macOS Desktop Support-

Assistance for macOS desktop changes from a technical preview to alpha. Now you can build a Flutter project that effectively runs on macOS using ‘Flutter Create’. Desktop application support gets numerous upgrades, developing menu dropdown keyboard navigation, visual density assistance, radio buttons, checkboxes, etc. Upgrades in Linux and Windows are still continue in the tech preview stage.

4. iOS 13 Dark Mode-

For the individuals who like to go with consistent development, the greatest upgrade coming with Flutter 1.12 is complete support for dark mode in iOS 13. This year, Flutter select appropriate support for auto toggling to dark mode on Android 10, with less efforts for developers to engage, if they use stock Material Design widgets of Flutter. As of Flutter 1.12 introduction, all the iOS-like widgets, named Cupertino, are now similarly available in a dark theme that can be enabled automatically on the dark mode settings of a device.

5. Add-to-app-

Another new feature of Flutter 1.12 is stable, official help for adding Flutter to any current Android or iOS application. This is more helpful in the migration of an application to the Flutter once, rather than requiring starting from the beginning. In addition, Android application developers can experience the benefits of recently included ‘Flutter Module’ option in the New Module perspective on Android Studio to easily add Flutter to the Android projects they are working on.

6. Updated DartPad-

The updated DartPad has incorporated the strength of not entirely changing Flutter code, but also evaluating the rendered UI and running the Flutter code efficiently.

7. Adobe XD to Flutter Plugin-

Now Flutter has tied up with Adobe XD and the XD is accessible to the Flutter plugins. The goal of Flutter to make simple designs and more efficient for helping developers and designers in working together appearing as accomplished with Adobe XD partnership. The latest XD in Flutter changes the XD designs automatically into code and makes a usable part of Flutter application development. In addition, it helps product designers to design and prototype simple user experience for desktop, web, mobile, and so on.

8. Google Fonts Package-

The Flutter development team introduced new Google Fonts package. This benefits an access to almost 1,000 open sourced fonts families. The ones that will allow designers to include attractive typography in the development environment within reach in just a line of code.

9. Create Widgets inline with Hot UI-

If you install the Flutter tools on your device locally, you will find another feature previewed in the Android Studio/IntelliJ plugin for Flutter. It allows you to see and coordinate with your widgets in your IDE as you are creating them. This feature is called Hot UI that makes changes in your code and updates the hosted UI.

10. Improvements in Android Build-

To upgrade Android, Flutter recognized some build issues in this release. They made the Android application development more unique, particularly around integrating plugins using Support Libraries and those using AndroidX. They moved the plugins of the Flutter team to AndroidX and propose all applications and plugins moving to AndroidX also. For plugins that haven’t yet switched, if there is a development issue, they have an alternative code path in their platform that uses Jetifier and Android Archive files. Slower platform is the reason of not being the main development framework, nut it fixes about 95% of the development issues the team has experienced.

11. Golden Image Testing-

The term Golden Image alludes to a prime image file that is considered the genuine rendering of a provided state, widget, application or other visual representation you have chosen to capture. In Flutter 1.12, the team has applications of the LocalFileComparator and GoldenFileComparator classes that compare by pixels instead of bits, reducing false positives. These latest applications feature visual differences for clarifying when there are difference between the updates under testing and your golden image.

Final Words-

Flutter is the new face of cross-platform development industry. But, it has not yet showed itself as the best choice for game development. Similarly, it has not yet offered any way to push code updated to the designed applications directly. In any case, it is normal that every one of these issues will be fixed in the coming years. The future of Flutter will acquire better alternatives in the form of Flutter 1.13 version or more updates.

If you are facing any difficulty to develop apps with Flutter, consult with Solace team. Solace developers are well experienced in Flutter development to provide you the best solution. Develop your Flutter app with Solace for more effectivity. We will be happy to help you.