For this session, the speaker was Yasser Ehab which is the head of department of android development and also a third year student in UTM. He was explaining on the workshop’s objectives. The objectives of this Building Whatsapp UI using Flutter workshop are get to know more about Flutter technology, know the uses of Flutter, know what is the material design how material design relate to Flutter, gain basic knowledge aout how Flutter works, able to make a simple project using Flutter which is the Whatsapp UI and know how to continue learning Flutter. He was also explaining about what is flutter. Flutter is one of the Google’s technologies for building mobile applications. Flutter is also a simple toolkit that allows developers to design interfaces for all sort of screen sizes and devices. So, developers can just produce an application that can be used in iOS and Android by using this Flutter.
Flutter comes with all sort of pre-built widgets that make it easy to lay out the application. From the Flutter website, Flutter is an open source User Interface (UI) Sotware Development Kit (SDK) created by Google. Open source means that developer can access the code base behind flutter technology. Flutter is Google’s UI toolkit for building beautiful, natively compiled applications for mobile, web and desktops from a single codebase. It is used to develop applications for android, iOS, the web and more. Flutter’s initial release was on May 2017. By that time, the programming language that it use was Dart. There were many applications that were built with Flutter. For example, the Google Ads, Singapore Bus Tracker (Maps and Navigation), Birch finance (credit card reward application), Alibaba.com (e-commerce application) and Reflectly (lifestyle application). Just for extra information, Flutter toolkit is free to develop the applications but developers need to pay for around 25 dollars for the developer account if the developers want to deploy the applications to the Google Play Store and the payment is a one-time payment. But for App Store, the payment is 100 dollars and it is paid yearly.