Exploring Flutter’s Widget Catalog: A Guide for Developers
Want to know about Flutter’s Widget? Looking to dive deep into Flutter App Development? If so, then you are at the right place! This blog is surely worth reading if you want to learn about Flutter. Nowadays, we’re gonna talk about widgets in Flutter!
By the end of this blog, you’ll have a comprehensive understanding of Flutter widgets and how to learn the entire widget catalog and work with them. Let’s get started…
Flutter Widgets and their importance?
Before reading this blog, do you have any ideas about Flutter Framework? How does Flutter work? How can you get started with Flutter? If you are completely unaware of all these. This blog is worth reading, as you will get to know or learn everything you need to get started with Flutter!
Now, let us start by knowing what these Widgets are. Widgets are vital, especially while building mobile apps with Flutter. Why? Everything, literally every single component of the mobile application or User Interface you see, is a widget. Let us illustrate…
If you see any page of any website, then each and every single component you can see is a widget. For example, a chart bar, Navigation bar, or any button available on the page is the widget itself. A bunch of widgets are all put together or stacked on each other to create a User Interface.
Widgets are the blocks of the user interface created with Flutter!
Now to explain these widgets, Flutter Widgets are building blocks that let you develop the User Interface of your mobile app. They are a collection of reusable User Interface elements that assist you build complex as well as responsive UI for your mobile application. Think of them as the different kinds of Lego blocks that you can utilize to build a Lego house. As already mentioned above, you can utilize Widgets to build sliders, images, buttons, text fields, and any other User Interface element that you require for your mobile app.
But widgets are not just UI elements! In actuality, they are small pieces of code that contain instructions, and a few instructions are given on how to show or display something on the mobile screen. This implies that you can customize each Widget to behave as well as look the way you willing it to.
Flutter’s Widgets are pieces of code, which means you can wire data and write functions or code so that the widget performs and behaves the way you want it to.
This approach to creating a User Interface is called “UI as Code.”
A simplest sample text widget can be created as shown below:
To add-on to it, the Flutter framework gives us a huge range of widgets that anyone can utilize to develop their mobile app. There are different kinds of states, styles, and types. Let us dive right into them!
Different kinds of Widgets
Flutter gives us comprehensive widgets. But for now, you need to know that widgets are mainly of 2 different types.
Material Design & Cupertino Design
As we all know, flutter lets us develop apps cross-platform.
Material design is a set of styles, widgets, or the design language that Google builds, utilizes by default, and is primarily created for Android.
Material design is the default design style, as all the Flutter developers might not have access to a Mac to create for iOS. Material design is colorful and playful, with rounded corners and more. (Why don’t you try it out and see for yourself?)
On the other hand, we have another kind of widget named Cupertino Design. This is the language or design style developed and utilized to create iOS or Mac apps. It is an elegant, simple, and sleek design language with a professional look.
You can utilize both design styles in a single codebase and develop an adaptive user interface for your mobile application.
Even though you can mix & match these design styles to develop a User Interface that you like. How cool is that?
Apart from all these, there is something known as ‘STATE’, and the widgets you develop are often utilized inside a Stateful or Stateless Widget.
Learning the entire widget catalog
In the above image, we learned that the widget catalog consists of different widgets, from text to animations and more. But the question arises: How do you learn them all?
There are plenty of widgets out there, and individuals usually make the mistake of trying to learn each widget. But why? Why do you have to learn each one of the widgets? Well, you don’t need to learn all of them. Simply learn to search for a widget in the catalog as per your use & implement it utilizing the documentation. It is that simple.
Here’s an instance of most flutter app developers of a reliable flutter app development company in India still don’t know every available widget. But they can develop wonderful mobile applications. How? Well, developers will simply plan their mobile application’s User Interface first. If they want to create an expense tracker, they will first plan their User Interface as to how we want it, like where the chart is supposed to be, how we want the transactions to be shown, where to be shown, etc.
That is it; planning the User Interface gets half the job done. Now, mobile app developers simply have to surf through the widget catalog and find the widget flutter app developers of a leading flutter mobile app development company in India need to build their User Interface in a top-down approach. As developers find their widgets, Flutter has superb documentation that Flutter app developers can refer to so developers can learn more about the widget and how to implement it in their mobile app.
Creating their User Interface piece by piece. When you do this, tell us, do you even require to learn everything?
Pro Tip: You can better organize your mobile application by breaking it down into widgets and creating a file for each widget or component. Try to have just one widget per file. This keeps your mobile application and organization structured and easy to work with.
Documentation of Flutter is your best friend. Learn to befriend any documentation, navigating and working with it. Around 90% of your concerns will be resolved.
The widgets’ beauty is that they might look difficult or hard to work with in the beginning, but as you keep working with them, using them becomes very easy, which is one of the best things.
But if you practice continuously, it becomes easy to have all the properties on your tongue precisely. The only effective way to really learn the entire catalog is to keep developing mobile apps, working with them, and practicing more and more.
You do not need to create complex applications; initiate with easy ones and get a good grip on how you can organize your mobile app, plan the User Interface, develop the widgets accordingly, work with them, & more. Keep iterating & watch yourself grow as well as become more fluent.
The Final Take
In this write-up, we have covered what widgets are, why we need to utilize them in Flutter, and how you can learn the entire widget catalog. With enough practice, you will be creating beautiful User Interfaces in no time! While this might seem fundamental, these are the basics that Flutter is built on. Having a good grip on this above point will take you a long way.