Hello World👋

Why Flutter and Firebase are best buddies

Jun 28, 2021 ⋅ 4 min

If you are starting a startup or building the next big app for the AppStore, I recommend trying out the pair Flutter and Firebase as a programming stack. Flutter and Firebase are both developed by Google, where Flutter is their open-source cross-platform app framework, and Firebase is their BaaS (Backend-as-a-service). Arguments for using Flutter and Firebase And here is where the first point why Flutter and Firebase are a good programming stack. Google is standing behind both Flutter and Firebase, which means the integrations between the two platforms almost flawless. Pretty much every product that Firebase offers can be integrated into a Flutter app with just a couple of lines of code. A bare minimum app linked to a specific Firebase project is only two lines in two separate files. In pubspec.yaml file: And in the main.dart file: So with just two lines, you can link your new Flutter app up to Firebase. The company Invertase is maintaining the plugins and is updating them. Invertase is also managing the Firebase plugins for React Native. So they have two teams working to support Firebase for both React Native and also Flutter. Below is a list of products in their stable version that supports Flutter. My second argument for using Flutter with Firebase is that they both are very beginner-friendly, with a lot of good documentation to help you set up a fast app that can get distributed to both Android and IOS at the same time. With Flutter as the frontend, can it help you a lot when it comes down to performance and distribution concurrent to two platforms. Firebase will, on the other hand, help you manage a scalable backend service for your app. It can be a pain to manage your own backend, like a VPS (Virtual Private Server) all by yourself, and by using Firebase, you can focus on making your app and get it out to the world fast and secure. The drawbacks of using Flutter and Firebase But there are also drawbacks of using Flutter and Firebase together. Flutter is the new kid on the block, so the community is so limited. This, unfortunately, means that there are only a limited number of answered community and Stackoverflow questions. But the Flutter community expanding rapidly every day. The problem with Firebase as a backend service is that it can be very costly if your app scales very fast. Because Firebase structured, so you pay for CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) actions on their database, and not only for the bandwidth you use, can it be very costly if you have an app that reads a lot of data from your Firestore If you want to build an app with Flutter and Firebase and are thinking This is will be the next Facebook. Then I recommend finding a good revenue strategy for how your app is going to make itself money. Conclusion Flutter and Firebase is a solid programming stack to build a cross-platform and scalable app. Flutter gives you the ability to create a fast and almost native app in no time. Firebase gives you a free tier of most of their products, which you can use to create an app with a solid 100-1000 daily users without any backend costs. But if your app scales to more than 50.000 users, you maybe need to consider either building your own backend (API, Database, etc.) or creating a solid revenue plan for your app, which can pay for its monthly bills. Final Note: Let me know what you think about using Firebase and Flutter to build cross-platform apps. Are you a fan of those technologies, or are you using other technologies/programming stacks?

Custom Search Shortcuts on Google Chrome

Jun 21, 2021 ⋅ 4 min

Introductions to !Bangs Most of my friends who use DuckDuckGo daily have used the !Bang feature alongside the normal browser to increase their productivity. DuckDuckGo has been adding different shortcuts to their search engine since 2008, and they are still the only search engine that promotes this feature. But because I use Google Chrome, and there weren't integrated custom shortcuts by default, I needed to figure out a way to implement it. Therefore I began to search the web for how to make my own shortcuts to different websites, and after many hours I could not find any solution to the problem. But I found a built-in function in Google Chrome which is the "Custom Search Engines" Here you could get a list over some of Chromes Default Search engines as well as other websites search engines. Google Chrome has been adding websites custom search engine automatically by default without anyone knowing. So if you look up the list of custom search engines on your Chrome browser, it most likely has a lot of website search engines already added. How to create your own "!Bang" Firstly you need to make sure that you have access to Google Chromes custom and other search engines. You can check by going into the settings, and under Search Engine. Then you will need to click on "Manage search engines", it's here where you can manage your main search engine, which in my case is Google and your custom search engines (!Bangs) Find the search URL Secondly, we need to find the URL to a specific website we want to add to our custom search shortcuts. You can only add websites that include our search term in the URL. So if a website's URL doesn't change when you search, it most likely can't be added to a custom search shortcut. But websites like Youtube, Twitch, Facebook, and most of the Google Apps support it. For example, we can take the website Twitch, which is a live streaming platform for all kinds of things. When we search on Twitch, Twitch updates its URL to include our search term, as seen in the picture below. We are looking for the bit in the URL after twitch.tv/search?term= which in our case, there has been searched on "Hello World". Adding the website to our Custom Search Shortcuts Now that we have found the URL which we want to add to our Custom Search Shortcuts, we can add it to the list. Firstly we need to click on the little add button, which opens a box we can enter a name of the shortcut, a keyword, and the URL. Here will we give our Shortcut a name, which in our example is Twitch. Afterward, will we find a keyword phrase that we like. It's this phrase we need to enter into the search box of our Chrome Browser. So a good thing is also trying to keep it as short as possible, and also make it understandable, so we can remember it. The last part is to copy-paste the URL we found into the URL box, and replace our search term which in our example was "HelloWorld" with a %s. The %s will get replaced when we use our custom search shortcut. Finally, click the add button, and there you will see your first created shortcut, which you can use to search websites faster. Type the keyword into your browser, press space, and see the magic happen. 🔮 Bonus Tip: Because Google Chrome by default adds a website's search engine into our Custom Search Engines, you can add a little star (*) in front of the name of your Custom Shortcuts. This will move all of your custom search shortcuts to the top of the list. Bonus Tip #2: If you don't want a star in front of all your shortcuts, you can add a little nice extension that prevents the browser to add websites custom search engines. Link Here Thanks! Thanks for reading my first article on how to create custom search shortcuts. If you have any questions feel free to comment below. Have a wonderful day 😄

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