Live-coding a beautiful, performant mobile app from scratch

Flutter is a new, open source, mobile SDK. Matt Sullivan and Emily Fortuna walk you through live-coding a Flutter app from scratch. You'll learn how to design a UI using Flutter's subsecond hot reload, pull in live data over a network, manage that data using streams, and even access some native code for those tricky platform-specific APIs.

Mobile app development has been a tough nut to crack for open source software. This is made worse by the trend toward highly customized user interfaces. Current practice for building top-tier mobile apps requires separate teams of programmers for each target platform, each using different languages, different frameworks, and different programming tools. A group of engineers at Google, including people who worked on the Chrome browser renderer and the V8 JavaScript engine, wondered what they could achieve if they broke all the conventional rules about building user interfaces. They designed a new architecture that could do layout and rendering at 60 frames per second, built a reactive framework, put the entire framework in the user’s app so that everything is easily customizable, and built full sets of customizable widgets from scratch. The result: Flutter, Google’s mobile app SDK for crafting high-quality native interfaces on iOS and Android in record time. Matt Sullivan and Emily Fortuna walk you through live-coding a Flutter app from scratch. You’ll learn how to design a UI using Flutter’s subsecond hot reload, pull in live data over a network, manage that data using streams, and even access some native code for those tricky platform-specific APIs. Flutter allows programmers and designers to experiment and play with their app’s user interface; new features can be added quickly and tested immediately; and the resulting app runs at 60 fps on both iOS and Android, while keeping the look and feel for each platform.