With the remote culture continuing, the responsibility of bringing the community together lies on our heads and we were excited to partake in keeping up the trend of bringing the lovable community of devs and enthusiasts together for a few hours, just to talk and learn about their favourite framework a little more.

The Flutter Remote Meetup was streamed live on the GeekyAnts YouTube Channelon 8th August, 2020 with a lineup of great speakers (as always) and diverse topics.

TL:DR

Watch the event here:

The following is a summary of all talks presented on the event.

Rishit Dagli — AI With Flutter

Today, ML is running the world. On handheld devices, ML algorithms reduce power consumption, reduce inference time and is better security wise as it does not involve sending any data to the cloud. Rishit explored ML kit and how it can be used to run ML models on android as well as use pre-trained or custom TensorFlow Lite models. He moved on to steps of how to build a face recognition app in 15 minutes. He established dependencies, made an app with Flutter that picks and loads images and built a model to get inference that recognises faces using FireBase Vision and dealt with use cases where the app design can be bad or users might close their app and finally showed a live demo of facial recognition.

Devanand P — Widget testing — The Untold Story

As Flutter developers, there is a lot of focus on development rather than testing. Testing plays a major role in making applications robust and establishes reliability. Devanand thinks that the ideal way to test is while development and discusses the types of testing that can be done, namely Unit Testing, Widget Testing & Integration Testing, while explaining each of them. He says that if these methods of testing are followed during development diligently, manual testing at the end will become extremely easy and straightforward. He then showed demos on how to perform tests in a basic counter app and talked about packages in Flutter that will help test apps on the go.

Ayush Shekhar — Working With Device Cameras In Flutter

Ayush, in his presentation, talked about how Device cameras can be used ideally when developing apps in Flutter. He talked about the plugins that can be used, the methods that work and limitations of functionalities in such apps. His talk was entered around apps that require hardware interactions using APIs, like content rich apps that use cameras to take pictures, videos and then play them as well. He did not have many slides to share but went swiftly onto a live demo of an app that he coded in 15 minutes and demonstrated how to integrate camera interactions in apps. He gave a shout out to GeekyAnts for building the ‘Flick Video Player’ that he used in his app and he called it one of the coolest Flutter video plugins out there. In the end, he discussed some miscellaneous use cases and plugins to enhance the app.

Sivamuthu Kumar — Flutter Apps that are powered by GraphQL with Hasura

Sivamuthu Kumar, an architect by profession, talked about Hasura GraphQl, how it powers the PostgreSQL database and how to set it up with Flutter Apps. He introduced GraphQL and compared it to REST, which has multiple end-points making queries. He spoke about under fetching and overmatching problems that GraphQL does away with. He then introduced the Hasura Engine and how it acts as the intermediate between GraphQL and PostgreSQL database. He explained the entire interaction flow of the three elements with a live demo of an emotion tracking app built in Flutter. He closed his presentation with a set of action items that the viewers can try.

Nitish Sahani — Myths and facts about architectures and principles

Nitish Sahani, a software developer, talked about the basics and in-depth principles of Architectures, State Management techniques, Design Principles and MVC/MVP/MVVM in Flutter. He went back into the roots of these established architectures to establish what they actually are and what they’re good at. He tried to tackle the question, “Which one is the best?” The basic idea here is that no-one technique or architecture is better than the other. The selection of these techniques are dependent on how applicable they are in the scenario of your development environment and it is important to understand the fundamentals behind these techniques to be able to pick the right one.

…and that was what the 9th Flutter Remote Meetup had to offer. Needless to say, we will return with more big names in the industry and more intriguing topics to talk about in the next edition.

Till then…

Godspeed.