Building the First Major Flutter MacOS App

Google tasked us with building a slides desktop application for macOS using Flutter to demonstrate how Flutter Desktop Embedding works.

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‍First Major Flutter Desktop App

Google regularly turns to Very Good Ventures to demonstrate Flutter's capabilities — we built Hamilton, the first commercial mobile app using Flutter, as well as the first web app, KENKEN for The New York Times. For this project, we used Desktop Embedding — an implementation of Flutter that enables Flutter apps to run on Windows, macOS, and Linux — to build a slides presentation app.

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Customizable Slides

We designed the slides to contain rich text and had to make them resizable to fit any window so that users would have a similar experience when viewing on mobile compared to desktop. We also implemented navigation controls to move through the slides. All slide content is contained within one JSON file for easy updates in one place.

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Animations and Embedded Code

The slides applications includes a variety of transitions, scaling effects, and carousel and other useful animations. But the shining star of the project was demonstrating that any Flutter code could run as a desktop app. Now, instead of limiting presentations to screenshots or video captures of code, the app can embed code and run real apps directly in the slides.