Highlights Of Flutter 3.3 Released During Flutter Vikings Conference

In the name of God, this year’s third release of Flutter 3.3 is here, giving Flutter developers more opportunities to build out the world apps for Android, iOS, Mac, Windows, and more from a single codebase. Google unleashed what’s new in Flutter 3.3 at the beginning of a community-led conference, Flutter Vikings, dedicated to Flutter and Dart that took place in Oslo.

It’s good to see how the Flutter economy is snowballing. Over 500K developers from different corners of the world registered for the event. Not only fan following but the usage of Google’s “massive cross-platform” development kit has also increased, said Tim Sneath, “Every day, more than 1,000 new mobile apps using Flutter are published to the Apple and Google Play stores, along with more usage on web and desktop,” he added.

Moving further, the Flutter 3.3.0 release note focuses on refining the performance to reinforce Flutter 3’s features. It also includes extending support for Google’s latest design language, Material You, with newly updated widgets and improvements, Scribble handwriting, selectable text grouping, and more.

With this release, Flutter’s underlying programming language Dart upgrades to 2.18 with FFI support for libraries and connects with Swift and Obj-C code. There is so much to know about Flutter 3.3.0 release note so that you can enhance Flutter development performance across desktop, web, and mobile. So, let’s get going!

Flutter 3.3 Release Note Highlights Worth Your Attention 

Material Design 3

IconButton, Chips, and AppBar, with large and medium variants from Material 3 have all been improved in this Flutter release. And faster loading times and lower memory usage for images included in the app are possible with the new ui.ImmutableBuffer.fromAsset() method. 

However, to leverage these redesigned widgets of Material You, Flutter developers need to opt for “useMaterial3.” Given that the team has kept it optional. 

Scribble 

The Flutter team has brought interesting, exhilarating, and amusing UI with default support for Scribble handwriting input on iPadOS using the Apple Pencil. Flutter developers can easily enable this functionality by upgrading to Flutter 3.3, and it will be enabled by default on “CupertinoTextField,” “TextField,” and “EditableText.”

Text input

Flutter 3.3 has also focused on the text input and improved it by introducing the ability to receive granular text updates directly from “TextInputPlugin.” So now, TextEditingDeltas and the DeltaTextInputClient fill the information gap that occurred previously as the plugin couldn’t differentiate between old and new. Consequently, developers can create an input field that contracts and expands as you type.

Global Selection

Mark our words when we say Flutter will dissolve the fine line between cross-platform and native apps no matter what platform. Until the Flutter 3.3 release, you couldn’t match web experience with expected behavior while attempting to select text. 

Because web native apps also contain a tree of elements, and you can easily select multiple web elements with a single gesture. But this was not the case in Flutter web apps before. Now, the introduction of the SelectableArea widget lets you enable the selection of any child of the widget for free. 

New Graphic engine “Impeller”

Flutter uses the Skia rendering engine but looking at the future, Google’s team is working on a new next-gen rendering layer, “Impeller.” The new graphic engine will utilize the power of hardware-accelerated graphic APIs Metal on iOS and Vulkan on Android to give a performance boost to your Flutter app. 

However, the Impeller is currently available as an early adopter preview on iOS and seeking your feedback. So, when are you trying? 

Wonderous: UI reference app

Partnering with Gskinner’s design team, the Flutter team has created this wonderful Wonderous app that showcases how far Flutter goes in delivering high-end, beautiful user experiences. The app lets you explore the world’s best places, from the Taj Mahal to the Mayan ruins of Chichén Itzá, right on your phone.

Its wide range of visual techniques, UI, and graphics are to inspire Flutter developers. Above all, by installing the app on an Apple device, you can see Impeller in action. 

VS Code improvements 

The Flutter 3.3 release has taken the pain of adding dependencies out of the Visual Studio Code Extention for Flutter. Using Dart: Add Dependency, Flutter developers can now add multiple and comma-separated dependencies in one step.

Navigation API

The Flutter team has taken care of Flutter app development with complex navigation requirements by extending its native navigation API. the go_router is a Flutter package that simplifies routing through a declarative, URL-based API to navigate and handle deep links. Now, they have rolled out a new version, 4.3 of this package, that enables redirecting using asynchronous code. Ultimately, it makes navigation across mobile, web, and desktop even smoother.

DevTools

The DevTools have been updated with a number of refinements since the last release to make the development process smoother and more geared towards results. These updates include performance boosts in data display tables, UX optimization, smoother scrolling of large lists of events, and more.

Lastly, let’s peep into what’s new in Dart 2.18

With Google’s SDK, its programming language also grows, and this time it turns to Dart 2.18; here are its notable improvements. 

Dart’s “FFI–Foreign function interface” support has been extended to seamlessly connect with code written in Swift and Obj-C. 

Dart 2.18 minimizes the need to write platform-specific code using the package:http Client API, which enables developers to achieve platform-specific behavior.

It also brings improved type inference to write more concise code while maintaining the complete soundness properties of the strongly inferred types.

Performance improvements to async code;

Improved interoperability;

New pub.dev features, such as a funding tag;

For more, you must check Dart 2.18 official post.

Upgrade or Build your app with Flutter 3.3

Not only enterprises but software companies have also started hiring Flutter developers rigorously, and the reasons are obvious. Every other project is using Flutter these days. So, the rising demand for Flutter developers is inevitable. 

From the Flutter 3.3 and Dart 2.18 releases, we can foresee where Google is taking cross-platform app development to. It would be foolish if you won’t take advantage of this marvelous technology to build out-of-the-box solutions.

Are your resources ready to create a Valhalla experience for your users with Flutter?