Flutter: How I built a simple app in under an hour from scratch. And how you can do it too. Norbert Follow Feb 15, 2018 · 3 min read

A brief introduction

I found out about flutter by a mere accident, I was scrolling through my Youtube feed and saw a lot of videos about the dart conference and it somehow caught my eye. I looked into it and I was excited from minute 0.

My preferred learning strategy is learning by doing. After reading through a few pages of documentation and investigating the app which is generated when you create a new project, I felt confident in trying something on my own.

The app

As you can see in the gif, it’s quite a basic App but there are still a few very interesting parts about it.

It uses the Google Books Api to fetch the books from their database

It shows a loading indicator while doing so

Book titles and images are both loaded

In traditional Android Apps this would take a few classes and a couple hundert lines of code.

In flutter, this app has 1 class and 129 lines of code including a few imports and the layout.

Sounds awesome right? Let’s get into it.