In the last half of the 19th century, the city of St. Paul gained a reputation as a beautiful summer destination but a horrible place to be in the winter. In 1885 a New York reporter, upon returning home after visiting the area, wrote that Minnesota was “another Siberia, unfit for human hibernation in the winter.” On October 31, 1885, a group of “about fifty or sixty” leading local business people met at the Ryan Hotel. They discussed ways to promote the winter splendor of the area. …

Welcome to Day Thirteen of the Sixty Days of Flutter Challenge. After a short hiatus, we are back to go over classes and constructors one last time before we dive headfirst into Flutter.

Dart is an object-oriented programming (OOP) language. In essence, this means that objects are represented through code. As we’ve learned previously, writing code as objects allows us to write once and reuse it as needed throughout our programs (remember D.R.Y.). This leads to less code and, therefore, smaller programs that are much easier to read.

At the top of the OOP chain is a super class. It…

Welcome to Day Seven of the #60Days of Flutter challenge. Today we are moving on from Dart — at least exclusively — and introducing ourselves to Flutter.

Coding in Flutter allows us to write for Android, iOS, Desktop, Web, and more using the Dart language. This means that instead of writing similar programs in multiple languages, we can write once and deploy multiple times.

Side note: The laptop I’m using is terrible, so until I get it fixed, I will use an online Flutter IDE at www.flutlab.io to code. …

Welcome to Day Six of the #60Days of Flutter challenge. Today, our last day of Mike Dane’s beginning Dart tutorial, we learned about some object-oriented programming (OOP) concepts — creating classes, constructors, and class functions.

Side note: In the tutorial, Mike said that the terms function and method could be used interchangeably. In an effort to not confuse myself, I’ve written function throughout this article.

The idea behind OOP is to structure your code to resemble “real-world” objects. Writing code as objects allows you to write once and reuse it as needed throughout your program. …

Welcome to Day Five of my sixty-day journey to learn Flutter. Thanks to the incredible work of Mike Dane, I’ve come a long way with Dart in a short time.

Today we learned about switch statements, while loops, for loops, and for…in loops.

A switch statement works in about the same way as an IF statement. It is used to see if one thing is equal to a bunch of other things. However, there are specific circumstances where one works better than the other.

Welcome to Day Four of my sixty-day-long project to learn mobile development with Flutter.

Learning syntax is an important part of this process. However, it is just a starting point. Today we take the next step and begin to learn how to inject intelligence into our Dart code with conditionals, boolean comparison operators, as well as and and or operators.

Conditionals are the bread and butter of programming. On its own, a computer can’t make decisions — it’s dumb. Using true/false statements, we can map out the decision-making logic for it.

One way — and probably the most popular way…

Welcome to Day Three of my sixty-day-long project to learn mobile development with Flutter.

Today we looked at lists, functions, parameters, and arguments. Similar to the first two days, we are continuing to concentrate (mostly) on syntax.

Lists are structures that show multiple pieces of ordered data. In essence, they are a variable that holds more than one thing.

There are four parts that go into a List:

(#1) The word List (#2)<list type> (#3)theName = (#4)[the, items, in, the, list];

Lists are put in brackets, and a comma separates each item.