In today’s post I wanted to speak about my recent experience using Flutter, a mobile native framework that uses Dart to build native apps. It’s been such a fun and positive learning experience since I started a couple years back (on & off) that I wanted to try and answer the following question, could you build a motivational quote app in just one weekend using the technology? Read on to find out 👀
Why a motivational quote app you might ask? Honesty I just really love them, I’ve been using “Motivation“ for a while now and thought why not take a crack at my own just to keep up to date with the latest version of Flutter. I found the following quote API at API Ninjas and that sold things for me 👌
To keep the scope within reason for a weekend I kept the UI simple, just like in Motivation, and I only focused on the iPhone. I’m also locked into the Apple ecosystem with no Android devices at home so it made sense to only stick to iOS.
The initial kickoff was easy to integrate with the API and the free tier is perfect for personal projects; it’s quite high and the limit refreshes monthly. For a personal motivation app that’s perfect, but I guess it depends on how many quotes you want and how you batch the requests 🤔 After having to update my local config, relearn the new Flutter changes and getting the API integrated it was time to call it quits for Saturday. Honestly not a lot was done, it resulted in a lot of waiting around and setup work 😅
Sunday I wrapped things up with the Simple UI, batch calling the requests from API Ninjas and got local notifications working. This was all thanks to the available libraries that exist out there to kickstart a lot of development. Yes there’s some setup for notifications across each platform (I used flutter_local_notifications) but it’s much less than having to learn and build for each platform separately. The app was VERY rudimentary, but again, the goal of the experiment was to evaluate, could you build a motivational quote app in just one weekend using the technology?
The answer resulted in a yes, it’s absolutely possible! All you need is an API to give you some quotes or…of course…you could always build a quick one and host it on CapRover 😉 Honestly I’ve been such a fan of the technology and I love seeing how powerful it is. The ability to create a rudimentary app in just one weekend that can be deployed across iOS, Android & Web is amazing. I know React Native exists but in my eyes, Dart + Flutter wins the competition for the best native setup. In the future I’d love to come back to it and work on a widget for it the app but that’s for a later time when I want to pay to reactivate my Apple developer account 😏 Until next time, happy hacking!