Unlock the Power of Collapsible Text in Flutter

Flutter Essentials: Strategies for Collapsible Text in Flutter

Rachel Walker Development Technologies, Flutter, Mobile, Tutorial 1 Comment

As a mobile developer, I have had to create a lot of listing pages. The content, styling, and layout may all differ, but structurally, they are the same. When I first started using Flutter, I was immediately impressed by how fast they are to stand up. Nearly out of the box, the ListView and the Card work extremely well and support a wide variety of devices and use cases with no additional styling – all while remaining extensible.

With this in mind, when I needed to create a listing page that displayed variable lengths of pre-generated text that could be expanded and collapsed, I was not particularly concerned about the complexity of the task. However, I very quickly realized that Flutter is less optimized for handling large blocks of text than it is for displaying lists. I quickly encountered unexpected complexities that I had to manually account for. In this post, I’ll walk through the basic structure and explore which components can be used for solving this problem and creating collapsible text in Flutter.

Automating Flutter Deployments: Part 2 – Screenshots

Rachel Walker Development Technologies, Flutter Leave a Comment

Recently, I worked on automating some internal processes for building and releasing Flutter applications. Part of this work has involved integrating integration test runs and screenshots as part of the release and deployment process.

I wanted to be able to use the same set of tests to validate our code on Android and iOS devices without having to write large amounts of platform-specific code or configuration. These tests needed to be able to integrate with Fastlane, so they can be utilized by CI/CD. Specifically, this restricted setup runs using command line tools with no manual steps in Xcode or Android Studio, aside project level configuration.

This blog is Part 2 of a three-part series exploring automating Flutter CI/CD on CircleCI. Part 1 covered setting up Fastlane to build and deploy applications locally, this post outlines automating screenshot capture and test runs, and part 3 discusses configuring CircleCI to automate these processes.

Automating Flutter Deployments: Part 1 – Fastlane Configuration

Rachel Walker Development Technologies, Flutter, Tutorial Leave a Comment

This blog is Part 1 of a three-part series exploring automating Flutter CI/CD on CircleCI. This post covers setting Fastlane to build and deploy applications, Part 2 will outline automating screenshot capture and test runs, and Part 3 will discuss configuring CircleCI to automate these processes.

The documentation for configuring Fastlane for Flutter is fairly comprehensive, however now that I have done it once, there are some things I wish I had known. As mentioned, this blog post will go through the steps for setting up Fastlane to run locally and provide some advice and resources for structuring the setup to easily migrate to a CI/CD platform.

Using Google Maps with FLutter

Using Google Maps with Flutter

James Fielder Development Technologies, Flutter, Mobile, Tutorial Leave a Comment

Flutter has a lot of amazing plugins that make it easy to develop cross-platform apps. Recently, I had the opportunity to work with a theater chain that made use of a map view to show nearby theaters. We used Flutter in conjunction with Google Maps.

In this blog post, we will take a look at the Google Maps Flutter plugin, which allows you to add an interactive map to your iOS or Android app and customize it in many different ways!

Moving Google Tag Manager from Xamarin to Flutter

Andy Link Development Technologies, Flutter, Mobile, Xamarin Leave a Comment

While working with a major theater chain, I was tasked with implementing Analytics into their Xamarin app. Part of that work included implementing Google Tag Manager. At a later date, I was again tasked with implementing Google Tag Manager but this time, into their Flutter app. I expected the implementation to be similar and definitely easier the second time around, but I found that to be false. The setup had some major twists and turns that I didn’t expect.

Although this was sometimes a frustrating challenge, I had fun figuring it out. Most companies running their apps with Xamarin will be moving their apps to a newer SDK like Flutter at some point. Flutter allows cross platform development for Android, iOS, Linux, macOS, Windows, Google Fuchsia, and Web from a single codebase and shared languages. So this move is almost inevitable.

In this post, I’ll take you through a step-by-step tutorial of transferring from Xamarin to Flutter. By the end, GTM will be in your Flutter app!