Flutter Day 2020 Highlights

Flutter Day is a 24-hour online educational event on Flutter with code labs, 3 live stream sessions, and a Q&A hosted by the official Flutter team! Following Flutter Day, the community-led Hack20 competition took place on 27–28th June 2020, encouraging our users to use what they’ve learned from Flutter Day. You can watch the highlights in the below video as well.

Because of COVID-19 Flutter Day was held online this year. Google Engineers showed some great new upcoming features of Flutter & Dart about which we super excited.

It was celebrated On 25th June 2020. If you miss watching the events don’t get tensed for about it. In this article, we will summarize the events and sessions of Flutter Day in less than 30min.

There were three sessions in Flutter Day 

• Session 1: Beautiful UIs
• Session 2: DevTools
• Session 3: Dart

We will discuss the summary of these three sessions and will provide some sources for you to dive more into it. so let’s get started with our first session that is Beautiful UIs

Session 1: Beautiful UIs

This session started with a talk with a Alex Vazquez , Co-founder of CodePen. For a newbie developer, CodePen is an online code editor for front end code. It allows you to code in Flutter without setting up any SDK or IDE and you quickly see the output of the code.

It is still in its early stages. In future enhancements, CodePen will add on-demand documentation and code suggestions as well.

After that second guest was Mariano Zorrilla. He has built some pretty cool designs using Flutter on CodePen. He has created almost 20 pens on Codepen in one month.

WhatsApp clone is one of my favorites.

You can check it from https://medium.com/flutter-community/try-flutter-online-now-megapost-ui-state-management-animations-designs-and-more-6a014b663e12.

After that, there was a QA session with the Flutter team engineer. They answered questions asked on Twitter and live chat.

Flutter has added new CodeLabs. Check out https://events.withgoogle.com/flutter-day/codelabs/#content for more details about it.

Session 2: DevTools

DevTools is a set of performance and debugging tools for Dart and Flutter. If you want to know more about it or want to know how to use it you can check out this official document at https://flutter.dev/docs/development/tools/devtools/overview

In this session, they introduced new features that are coming to DevTools.

New Feature called Layout Explorer has been Introduced.

Layout Explorer allows you to change the property of the Row or Column widget from DevTool and it reflects the changes immediately on the screen. This feature is only available for the Row and Column widget. This feature is very useful when you get some UI pixel errors and you want to try out different combinations of properties of Row widget or Column widget.

Another feature that was added is called Track Widget Build. This feature tells us which widget is taking so much time to load and causing low performance.

Now you can inspect network calls in DevTools. You can see requests, responses and headers and etc.

You can checkout for https://medium.com/flutter/new-tools-for-flutter-developers-built-in-flutter-a122cb4eec86

Session 3: Dart

Dart is a type-safe language. This means that when you get a variable of some type, the compiler can guarantee that it is of that type. But the type of safety by itself doesn’t guarantee that the variable is not null. Dart has this new feature called sound null safety. 

Basically, it’s a compile-time null check. If your variable is non-nullable then it warns you at compile time that it will throw null pointer exception in some cases.

This feature is still in tech preview. You should check this official blog https://medium.com/flutter/new-tools-for-flutter-developers-built-in-flutter-a122cb4eec86

DartPad has added this sound null safety so if you want to play with this you can check this link out https://nullsafety.dartpad.dev.

Also, there were some small meetups for Flutter day arranged by the Flutter community. You can check https://events.withgoogle.com/flutter-day/ to know more about all sessions and new announcements about Flutter day.

Thanks for reading !!!
Stay tuned for more updates on flutter !!!

Written by Nirali Patel

Nirali Patel is a dedicated Flutter developer with over two years of experience, specializing in creating seamless mobile applications using Dart. With a passion for crafting user-centric solutions, Nirali combines technical proficiency with innovative thinking to push the boundaries of mobile app development.