At the on-going Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2019, Google today launched a new version of its cross platform UI framework Flutter. In addition to Flutter 1.2, it also showcased a preview of new web-based suite of programming tools to help Flutter developers debug & analyze their apps. These tools are now available for installation alongside the extensions & add-ins for Visual Studio Code & Android Studio, & offer a number of capabilities.
For now, Flutter is focused on the mobile, & the language used to build apps is called Dart.
Flutter 1.2 is the 1st feature update for Flutter, & has improvements in the following areas:
- Improved stability, performance & quality of the core framework.
- Work to polish visual finish & functionality of existing widgets.
- New web-based tooling for developers building Flutter applications.
Flutter 1.2 includes the Dart 2.2 SDK, an update.
The tools that have been released are:
- A widget inspector, which enables visualization & exploration of the tree hierarchy that Flutter uses for rendering.
- A timeline view that helps you diagnose your application at a frame-by-frame level, identifying rendering & computational work that may cause animation ‘jank’ in your apps.
- A full source-level debugger that lets you step through code, set breakpoints & investigate the call stack.
- A logging view that shows activity you log from your application as well as network, framework & garbage collection events.
Image Credit: Flutter
