Engineering: Flutter

Full-Stack Development with Ionic and Nitric

Why Nitric? Nitric is a multi-language framework designed to simplify and accelerate cloud application development. It abstracts away the complexities of cloud infrastructure, allowing developers to focus on writing code rather than managing underlying resources. Nitric provides similar benefits for backend development to those cross-platform solutions like Ionic and Flutter provide for frontend development.  
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11 min read

Building a Flutter SDK: A Deep Dive Into pub.dev — Part Two

Introduction Building a Flutter SDK is a series about crafting your own Flutter packages and SDKs from scratch. The articles in the series put into words the lessons the Stream Flutter team has learned over the years building our own Flutter SDKs. The series uses two of our SDKs as examples which you can take
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14 min read

Building a Flutter SDK: Breaking Down a Flutter Package — Part One

Background In our opinion, it is generally easier to write a package for Flutter compared to other app development frameworks. Packages do not take a tremendous amount of specific knowledge to create if you already know app development in Flutter. In other frameworks, packages can have different structures and several distribution methods, making it much
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10 min read

Definitive Flutter Painting Guide

“Everything is a widget.” Well, yes - but what is a widget? Widgets used in making Flutter apps can themselves be composed of smaller widgets. Most widgets carry some kind of visual component - either defined by themselves or represented by smaller widgets. Unlike native frameworks, Flutter underneath does not use OS views. Instead, Flutter
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29 min read

Tips & Tricks to Improve Flutter Performance

Held in Oslo, Norway (and more recently online), FlutterVikings is the largest community-driven Flutter conference in the Nordic region. Focused on Flutter and Dart, the conference gathers global Flutter experts from some of the world’s most innovative and well-known tech companies for two days of technical presentations, networking, and connecting with sponsors. Stream was proud
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1 min read

Build Vikings Feb 2022 Winners 🎉

As avid open-source Flutter developers, the Stream team was in full attendance at this year's Flutter Vikings conference. Similar to our previous participation at Flutter Vikings, the team decided to host a codelab and hackathon for the event. For this year's codelab, entrants were required to create a chat application with custom stickers and animations. A daunting task! We
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1 min read

Why Every Flutter Dev Should Care About BuildContext

While the quest for abstraction and the purist’s assertion that all APIs should be simple by design are both noble pursuits, there is a point where too much abstraction becomes harmful and hinders the personal growth of new developers. One of the most common complaints of developers who are new to Flutter is the general
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11 min read

Add Location Sharing to a Messaging App Using Flutter

A stand-out feature of the most popular messaging applications is the ability to share a user's location quickly and conveniently with trusted peers. Using Stream Chat and Flutter, we can implement a similar feature in very little time. In this article, we will build a small location-sharing chat feature using Flutter, Stream Chat, and the
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15 min read