wafrat - wafrat (Page 11)

Chromebook: first impressions

I just purchased my first Chromebook, an HP Chromebook x2. After years of reading about advances in ChromeOS, pros and cons vs other platforms, it's time to make my own opinion! Set up It's as easy as signing into your Gmail account! Once you sign in, it automatically downloads your

dart

Submitting Forms in DartAngular

My chat app had a bug where, if I typed very fast, the letter from the next message would be sent along in the previous message. It would look like "yesterdaym/y laptop..." instead of "yesterday/my laptop...". My initial thought was that it was because I was using Template-driven

flutter

GestureDetector on transparent Widgets

I've been using a GestureDetector to detect taps on an icon. The problem is that unless I tapped exactly on the icon, it wouldn't detect the tap. My first idea was to wrap the Icon in a Container with some padding: return GestureDetector( onTap: () { ... }, child: Icon(Icons.bluetooth)); to return

visual studio code

Test coverage in Dart & Flutter

Unit tests improve productivity dramatically. With enough coverage, you can make changes quickly while ensuring you have not broken any significant piece. How it works You run your unit tests and a tool measures which lines have been tested. The information is stored in an lcov*.info file. Later an

flutter

Optimizing for Flutter development

I use a MacBook Pro 13 (2017, 8 GB, no touch bar), and everything seems so slow: typing is laggy, running the projet in the emulator freezes the computer for a good minute, clicking in the emulator misses half the time, so I have to click several times for it

flutter

Authentication in Flutter

Authentication and integrating a database are the two building blocks of any app. We use authentication to make sure users have access only to their own data. Initial set up Setting up Firebase Auth as per the docs: https://pub.dartlang.org/packages/firebase_auth They also tell us to

flutter

Integrating Firebase into a Flutter app

Following the Flutter Firebase codelab: * Created a Firebase project. * Added the debug SHA signature. To get it, run keytool -list -v -alias androiddebugkey -keystore ~/.android/debug.keystore with no password. * Ran it in the emulator. * It failed with an error about multidex. Luckily the tutorial explains how to work around

flutter

Publishing a Flutter app to the Play Store

I'll skip details for the first few steps. Set up an empty app Empty app Test on Android and iOS VM Set up BitBucket repo git init git add . git commit -a -m 'initial commit.' Publish to Play Store as Alpha I followed the Flutter doc on deploying (doc)

flutter

Learning Flutter

As explained in my previous post, Dart can be used to write mobile apps. I want to write a flashcard app for Android. Setting up the environment I am using a MacBook. I installed Flutter 0.9.4 beta. Then as per the docs, I installed Android Studio Preview, installed

dart

Why I've been learning Dart

I've been using Dart to build apps lately and it's been mostly fantastic! Dart was built by Google. It was designed to be familiar, simple yet powerful. Since it heavily resembles Javascript, it is very easy to learn. And since it has none of Javascript's quirks you don't have to

web development

The iPad is not great for coding

Remember when I said I could now code on my iPad (see post)? I take that back! The first issue is that Cloud9 crashes every once in a while. The alternative is to work over SSH, but then it’s it’s really sluggish. I also found three alternatives to

web development

Web development setup: from a local to a remote dev environment

In recent years, I've developed web applications mostly on a MacBook. The stack would go like so: * BitBucket for private, remote git repositories. Why not GitHub? BitBucket provides free private repos, while GitHub charges for it. * SourceTree by Atlassian for a visual source control * Frontend built with React based web

android

Notifications

Users can now add, reorder, dismiss reminders. Now how do we remind them of those reminders? With notifications! Design There are guidelines for when and how notifications should be used. There are many details about the structure of notifications: * header area * content area * action area that contains buttons Notifications can

android

ProGuard

ProGuard is an open-source tool to optimize APK's so that they take less space and run slightly faster. It can also help obfsucating code, but only slightly, according to their landing page. After integrating Crashlytics, I enabled ProGuard. Crashlytics was incredibly useful for investigating the resulting crashes I got. Enabling

android

Crash reports with Crashlytics

When releasing to the Play Store, you build a release version of the APK, stripped of all debugging information. So if a crash happens, there is no way to connect to the phone over adb and get system logs. The solution is to use a library that catches those exceptions

android

Enabling Firebase Database for Release builds

After integrating Firebase Database, my alpha builds started failing with an unhelpful "Developer Error". I found this post explaining you should whitelist the SHA1 of both the debug and release version in the Firebase Console. Indeed, I had forgotten to add the one for the release version. So I ran

android

Lists

In this post, I will talk about Lists: how to display a list of items, handle interactions like swipe to dismiss, drag to reorder. ListView First I set out to display a hardcoded list. The guide about List View on Android Developers pages shows a long example with asynchronous loading

android

Pass data between activities

To add a reminder, the user will click a button from the List activity — the activity that shows the current list of reminders. The List activity will open a Reminder setup activity that contains a text box, and in the future some affordance to set the location and possibly day

android

Working with Firebase Realtime Database

In the previous post, we set up authentication. Now that the user is authenticated, we can store and retrieve data from the database specific to that user. Modeling the data The Firebase Database documentation explains how to model data in a way that avoids data duplication. It's called data normalization,

ghost

Setting up the blog

Which blogging platform to choose? Choices I could have picked: * a free hosted solution like Medium or Blogger * a paid solution like WordPress.com or Squarespace * a self-hosted solution using an open-source project like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla A quick search shows that WordPress is the dominant blogging platform today. Not

Why I write

I've been writing software for a long time. Over the years I've learned new concepts, languages and tools. Software development is a broad field that evolves fast, and I will forever be a beginner in most of it. Even though writing software is my job, I have struggled to keep

android

Beginning Android – Authentication

Now that the skeleton of the app is made and it is pushed to the Alpha channel, it is time to build real functionality. In the previous post, we discussed how to set up a new Android app, sign it and publish it to the Play Store in a closed

android

Beginning Android

To start my journey learning Android, I chose to make a revolutionary app... A todo app!! Fine, it's actually been made before. You can try out a few dozen ones on the Play Store. Still, none of them satisfied my requirements: * free and ad-free * location reminders * phone notifications * day of