Google polishes Flutter toolkit input for version 3.3

Google has announced a further upgrade to Flutter, its mobile UI toolkit for creating embedded graphic components from a single codebase via native Arm code.

The release adds improved support for trackpad input, improved text selection, the capability to understand Scribble handwriting input, more consistent presentation for Windows desktop and support for more Material Design 3 components.

Version 3.3 of the toolkit also includes Dart 2.18, which introduces FFI support for libraries and code written in Swift or Objective-C.

“This release is focused on refinements and performance improvements that reinforce the features shipped in Flutter 3,” said Tim Sneath, the Group Product Manager for Flutter and Dart at Google.

“It expands support for the evolving Material 3 specification with several new components and a number of bug fixes, and it includes new features aimed at tablet and desktop developers including Scribble handwriting support on iPad, selectable text grouping, and trackpad support.”

The announcement was officially made at the “Flutter Vikings” conference in Oslo.

The flutter team also highlighted on-going work on Impeller, its next-generation rendering layer for flutter.

“Impeller is a significant rewrite of a core part of the Flutter engine, replacing the previous Skia code with a custom runtime that takes full advantage of modern hardware-accelerated graphics APIs such as Metal on iOS and Vulkan on Android,” said Sneath. “It delivers silky-smooth animations, considerably raising the bar for what applications can expect from a multiplatform UI toolkit.”

You can read more about the Flutter 3.3 update here.

See also: Flutter 2.0 embedded UI toolkit embraces Windows, macOS and Linux