Flutter in Action Chapter 4 "Flutter UI"

Completed taking notes on "Flutter in Action" chapter 4 "Flutter UI".

https://www.manning.com/books/flutter-in-action

This chapter of the book quickly reviewed important Flutter UI widgets.

SystemChrome the native device controller was mentioned, along with the widgets WidgetsApp, MaterialApp, Scaffold, and some material design widgets like AppBar.

Other important widgets mentioned in the chapter were Stack (the foreground/background alpha blender), Table, TabBar, and ListView.

The complete Flutter theme process was explained.  Basically you pass a ThemeData object to MaterialApp.theme, although there are interesting details.  MediaQuery can read info such as absolute pixel heights and widths.

The explanation of how to use additional fonts in Flutter using the pubspec.yaml file to attach the asset and then apply in a theme, was very clear and easy to follow and implement.

Dart does named imports where you can set a custom (probably short) prefix to everything imported in a package.

Its hard to cover some of these UI widgets without discussing Async Dart techniques.  I'm not sure why async is covered in a later chapter; that topic should be something like chapter 2.5 not chapter 9.  Perhaps the author was trying to avoid too much Dart and not enough Flutter, in the first half of the book.

I'm a fan of the subject depth of this chapter.  Too much detail is wasted paper, simply check out the online Flutter Widget Catalog for infinite detail, but not enough detail and the readers won't know what is generally possible or what the overall outline of the system looks like.  I think the tightrope was walked nearly perfectly without tipping too far in either direction.

https://flutter.dev/docs/development/ui/widgets

Next up, chapter 5, "User Interaction".