flutter
🧠Widget catalog replacement brainstorm
Now that the Flutter Gallery is no longer maintained, the widget catalog is the only way to quickly browse Flutter's core widgets to get a rough idea of what is available and what each looks like.
However, the current widget catalog is out of date, isn't easy to maintain, isn't super visually interesting or interactive, and isn't easy to dive in to.
We need a low-maintainence solution that:
- Helps Flutter developers discover widgets relevant to their needs.
- Doesn't include non-key/otherwise distracting widgets or allows hiding them.
- Doesn't duplicate content from API docs, use from there if needed.
- (Mostly) Automatically updated, at least for the stable channel.
- (Preferably) Allows developers to view an example of the widget or a visualization of it.
Please respond with any thoughts or proposals, both big or small. Web-based, Flutter-based, or mixed options are all possibilities.
IMO we should solve this by improving the API docs experience (for readers and contributors). The widget catalog should just be the landing page of the API docs. I imagine this would make it much easier and tidier to automate the catalog.
This is only reasonable if we can update the API docs without making PRs into flutter/flutter. I wonder if there's a way pull the dartdoc data from flutter/flutter and just make the api docs part of this repo. (I have no idea, I'm spitballin' here).
As a bonus, if we (devrel) had more ownership over the api docs, we'd be able to improve the API docs and likely delete a bunch of pages from the docs sites.
This is only reasonable if we can update the API docs without making PRs into flutter/flutter.
I have seen a few issues on flutter/website repo about broken examples and UX improvements in the docs. Eventually updating flutter/flutter to resolve them.
@sethladd has thoughts about this, and it involves coaxing me into building something like [Interactful] (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/interactful/id1528095640). 🙂
It's an interesting idea. I think automated updating is a hard requirement, and I'm not sure what it would take technically.
Hi all! Yes, now that we have Flutter Web, and the super powers of genAI, I think we should invest in a live explorer of Flutter's super powers. I shared a spreadsheet with @ericwindmill about all the cool features it should contain.
re: automated updating, agreed there are some cool automations we could invest in here to teach us and to dramatically reduce the effort of maintaining this.
How can I help?
https://pub.dev/packages/dartdoc#categories is a possibility to automate things if you want to keep the index-like structure.
If going for more of a comprehensive, interactive demo, e.g. the Material 3 demo, which isn't hosted anywhere currently. It could be updated such that mentionned API classes are hyperlinked to the API docs.
