Flutter is Google’s cross-platform UI toolkit, and Google has recently released Flutter version 1.20 with many improvements. In the last stable version release, there were many updates, including substantial performance improvements, improved support for Metal on iOS, and new Material widgets.
Flutter 1.20 stable release has updates like performance improvements, several UI enhancements, an update to the Visual Studio Code extension, autofill for mobile text fields, and more.
What’s New in Flutter 1.20?
Let’s have a glance at the new features and developer tools of flutter 1.20:
Autofill for Mobile Text Fields
In every flutter app, the foremost requested and preferred feature is that the support for the text autofill.
Google introduces this key functionality in Fluttern1.20; however, some platform-specific configurations like PasswordRules on iOS aren’t enabled. The support for mobile text autofill also will come for web apps.
Performance Improvement
Google made the following performance improvement updates in the latest Flutter release:
- Google has introduced a performance solution for tree-shake icons for non-web applications. This feature helps in reducing the app size by removing the image that’s not highly utilized by users. This icon-free tree shaking feature is presently restricted to the TrueType fonts but consistent with Google; this prohibition will be removed within the future.
- An app with poor animation can impact it negatively within the first run due to a shady compilation jank. However, using Skia Shading Language Shader Warm-up, the shader compilation jank is often lowered by almost two times.
- Google has boosted the mouse hit testing’s performance within the web-based micro-benchmarks by 15 times. In turn, Google has become capable of incorporating the help of the mouse cursors, which will even be introduced in forthcoming widgets.
- Google has also improved the decoding time and speed of Dart’s UTF-8 Decoder in Dart 2.9.
Bringing Dart DevTools in Visual Studio Code
In Flutter 1.20, Google has incorporated the new Visual Studio Code extension that directly brings Dart DevTools into the visual studio code extension. Developers can enable this using the Dart.previewEmbeddedDevTools setting.
Interactive Widget
It has the all-new interactive widget to assist developers in style, building, and using interactive elements in apps like Drag n Drop, Pan, Zoom, and then forth. The API documentation for this widget is accessible only for the developers to upload and delve into the widget building process.
Updated DatePicker, TimePicker, RangeSlider, and Material Slider
Along with the new widgets, the flutter 1.20 version incorporates many updated widgets to satisfy the foremost recent Material instructions. These combine RangeSlider and Slider.
Updating Import Statements on File Rename
Another new feature for the Visual Studio Code is updating imports on rename. It allows the import statements automatically when developers need to rename or remove files.
The feature only works for single files, although support for multiple files or folders will be available soon.
Updated Version of the Network Page
The most recent version of Dart DevTools has accompanied an upgraded version of the Network page that permits web socket profiling.
Currently, the Network page includes timing data to the network calls from your application, alongside other data like content type and standing.
More enhancements are there to the small print UI to supply a knowledge analysis in an HTTP request or web socket.
New pubspec.yaml Format Needed to Publish Plugins
The flutter 1.20 version has accompanied several updates:
- A public service declaration is just in case you are a flutter plugin author, the legacy pubspec.yaml format is not anymore supported to publish plugins.
- The earlier format didn’t support particularizing which platforms get the plugins’ support and has been condemned since flutter 1.12. The newest pubspec.yaml format is presently needed to publish updated or new plugins.
Responsive Licenses Page
Another update of this release is that the all-new active licenses page accessible from the AboutDialog.
Tooling Metadata for all Tool Builders
It is another update for people developing flutter tooling. This tooling metadata for the flutter framework provides:
- A mapping of flutter framework color names to paint values, for both Cupertino and Material color sets
- A catalog of all recent flutter widgets
- Icon metadata for Cupertino and Material icons, incorporating preview icons and icon names
Typesafe Platform Channels for Platform Interop
Due to excessive demand from plugin authors, Google is experimenting on creating communication between flutters and, therefore, the host platform is simpler and safer for Add-to-App and plugins.
To address this requirement, Google introduces Pigeon a command-line tool that utilizes Dart Syntax to create a type-safe messaging code on top of the platform channels without including extra runtime dependencies.
Rather than matching method strings manually on platform channels and serializing arguments, developers can use Pigeon to pass non-primitive data objects and implore Swift/Kotlin/Objective-C/Java class methods by calling Dart methods directly.
Conclusion
According to Google, Flutter 1.20 is among the essential launches so far, and there are more to return within the future. The organization remains performing on executing other features, just like the remake of Maps, ads, new WebView plugins, sound null safety support, more tooling assistance, then forth.
Google is additionally performing on building better desktop and web support on Linux, where they declared an association with the Canonical.
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