Yesterday, Google has released the new version of its cross-platform UI toolkit, Flutter 1.20 stable. In the earlier version of its UI toolkit, Google has introduced many improvements like in performance, new material widgets, and improved support for metal on iOS. Today Flutter has the new version of 1.20 that indulge all the new improvements, and updates visual studio code extension, UI enhancements, autofill for mobile text fields, and many more.
The new version of Flutter 1.20 includes approx 5485 closed issues and 3029 merged PRs from 359 contributors from all around the globe and this is the largest number of contributors for any flutter versions till now released. Google has said that there are now 90,000 apps developed by using Flutter on the google play store, this number is increased from 50,000 apps back in April. According to Google, the top region that used Flutter the most for developing mobile apps in India. Let’s see the features and tools that a new version of flutter 1.20 bring for the app developers but before that take a look at the brief history of the flutter updates.
Performance Improvements
Here are some performance improvements made by Google in the new version of Flutter
- To improve performance, Google has included a performance fix for tree-shake icons when developers build non-web apps. This feature aids to reduce the size of the app by removing the icon that is not so used by the users. The feature icon-font tree shaking is prohibited to the TrueType fonts but Google assured that this restriction will be removed in the coming days.
- If an app has bad animation, it could affect the app badly and a shady compilation could happen. But with having Skia Shading Language Shader Warm-up, the shader compilation would be reduced up to two times.
- Google has improved the performance of mouse hit testing in the web-based microbenchmarks by 15x. As a result, Google has become able to include the support of the mouse cursors which will soon be launch in several upcoming widgets.
- In Flutter 1.20, Google has improved the decoding time and speed of Dart’s UTF-8 Decoder. The company has made measurable improvements of approx 200% for English and 400% for the Chinese text on the low-end ARM devices in the UTF-8 decoding benchmarks.
Autofill for Mobile Text Fields
Support for the text autofill in flutter apps is the highly demanded or requested feature among the developers. Google has fulfilled this demand of the developers with the release of Flutter 1.20 and also added basic functionality but some platform-specific configurations such as PasswordRules on iOS are not enable. Google brings this feature for web apps also.
Interactive Widget
This widget aids the developers to design and implement interactive elements in your apps like drag & drop, zoom, pan, and more. For this new widget, the API documentation is available only when the presentation is uploaded and immersed in the development process.
Embedded Visual Studio Code
For bringing the Dart DevTools directly into the visual studio code workplace, Google has added a new visual studio code extension in the Flutter 1.20. Developers can build this with the dart.previewEmbeddedDevTools setting.
Other Changes
Apart from the above-mentioned features, there are a lot of other developer tools and features changes brought in the Flutter 1.20. Here are a few of them:
- Some widgets like Rangeslider, DataPicker, Updated Slider, and TimePicker.
- From the AboutDialogue, a new responsive licenses page available.
- With the help of web socket profiling, an updated network page in Dart DevTools is available.
- For publishing new and updated Flutter plugins, a new pubspec.yaml format required.
- When files are renamed or moved in Visual Studio Code, support for automatically update import statements is available.
Conclusion
Google said that Flutter 1.20 is one of the biggest releases yet and there is a lot has yet to come. The company is still working on implementing other features like the new version of the ads, Maps, sound null safety support, new webview plugins, more tooling support, and many more. They are also working on making web and desktop support better especially on the Linux where they announced a collaboration with the Canonical.
Till then, stay safe, stay at home, wash your hands, and be happy
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Toddles!!
