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Google's Flutter 1.20 framework is out: VS Code extension and mobile autofill support

Google releases a new stable build of Flutter, its framework for creating user interfaces for mobile and desktops.
Written by Liam Tung, Contributing Writer

Google has announced the stable release of Flutter 1.20, the latest version of its popular cross-platform UI framework. 

Flutter is Google's UI framework for building apps for iOS, Android, Fuchsia, and the web – and as of last month it introduced the ability to build Linux apps to distribute through Ubuntu maker Canonical's Snap Store

There's also work under way to help developers target Microsoft's Android Surface Duo and Windows 10X devices

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Flutter 1.20, which is built on the 2.9 release of Google's popular Dart programming language, lets developers add autofill functionality to their iOS and Android apps so users don't need to re-enter data already collected by the OS when filling in forms. Support for web autofill is "coming soon", according to Google.

There are also performance improvements for Flutter and Dart. These are aimed at reducing the size and latency of Flutter-built apps, as well as improvements to reduce janky animations when they start up. 

On the desktop side of things, this release brings support for mouse cursors, a highly demanded feature requested by developers. 

There's a new widget called the InteractiveViewer for building features like pan, zoom, drag and drop to apps. Google has also updated the Slider and RangeSlider to conform with Material design guidelines. TimePicker and DatePicker have been revamped, too. 

On the tooling side of things, Google now lets developers bring Dart DevTools debugging screens in to Microsoft's Visual Studio Code code editor. 

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An update to Dart DevTools brings a new version of the Network page with timing information about network calls from an app, as well as status and content type information. 

A new feature for Visual Studio Code automatically updates import statements when files are moved or renamed. 

Google says there are now 90,000 Flutter apps in the Google Play Store, a figure that's up from 50,000 apps in April

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