Flutter Fast, Flutter Far — Issue #3

Continuous Animations in Flutter

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If your app ain’t animating, users ain’t engaging.

It’s a simple law of mobile app development that gets less attention than it deserves. Users want the impression that your app is alive — a living, breathing creation that does more than respond to taps and scrolls. Dynamically changing gradients, bouncing dots, and widgets that push at their boundaries like animals in a cage all give your app a personality that users will be thinking about long after they lock their screens.

So how can we add these types of digital dances to our Flutter apps?

In this issue of Flutter Fast, Flutter Far, I’ll be showing you how you can set up animations that never stop. Maybe they continue moving forward forever or maybe they pendulum between start and end values until someone tells them to stop.

Control That Animation

The life force behind all animations in Flutter is the AnimationController. This class allows you to run an animation in the forward and reverse directions at varying speeds and gives you, the developer, insight into how the animation is progressing. To show you how it works, I’m going to make a notification bell spin. See this tweet for the video.