The main technology I am using on the Forest Wellness Checkup App is Flutter. Flutter is a framework for developing cross-platform applications using the Dart programming language.

Flutter has clear and concise documentation. There are a variety of Codelabs that teach UI, debugging, and developement on different platforms. I particularly enjoyed “Building your first Flutter App” by Filip Hracek.

I struggled to learn React, but have picked up Flutter more quickly due to my familiarity with React. Flutter and React both use “Declarative UI” in terms of State management (Connolly). Flutter widgets are similar to React components (Connolly).

To improve performance on multiple operating systems, Flutter creates widgets to replace the OS UI widgets (Google). The Flutter/dart code can be compiled into native code (Google). However, this makes it more complicated to incorporate OS widgets into a Flutter application. You need to use a platform view widget to embed the native controls (Google).

Unfortunately, we want to include handwriting-to-text input in our application. On iOS, Apple Scribble will automatically allow stylus input in Flutter text fields (Koko). There is an issue on Flutter’s GitHub requesting additional Android support for this feature, but there are no updates (McCandless).

References

Connolly, Sean “Is Flutter similar to React?” https://seanconnolly.dev/is-flutter-similar-to-react

Google “Flutter architectural overview” Flutter Documentation,
https://docs.flutter.dev/resources/architectural-overview#rendering-native-controls-in-a-flutter-app

Hracek, Filip (March 1, 2023) “Building your first Flutter App – with a Codelab!” Google, www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sAyPDLorek

Koko, Mitch (Sep 3, 2022) “FLUTTER ♥ SCRIBBLE = Handwriting to Text!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZVNC64jA8k

McCandless, Justin (Nov 17, 2022) “Support stylus handwriting input on Android” GitHub,
https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/115607