Making a To-Do List app using Flutter

Growing up, making apps seemed to be a guarantee of success. I would always hear stories about the next Instagram-esque app that had arrived to capture the attention span of teens and young adults around the world and while a lot of them failed to dislodge the established titans, a vast number became wildly popular, even if only temporarily. That was enough to spark awe in my pre-teen eyes. App-making seemed like a wholly energetic, meritocratic yet vastly competitive field, and even though I now know that the meteoric app craze has vastly subsided (and could be compared to a bubble), that original charm and allure burrowed itself in my head.

A few weeks ago, that very fascination rekindled - having built largely algorithmic, terminal driven projects with the occasional GUI or website, I wanted to challenge myself to learn a new technology and use it to build apps. The task of crafting a beautiful user interface that is both inviting as well as captivating, alongside that of devising an error-free user experience and ultimately linking the design to a smooth and efficient back-end system intrigued me immensely and I set about looking for the best technology to use to craft my first app.

After some deliberation, I landed on Flutter - owing to its beautiful design, native support using only one codebase and the speed with which apps can be developed. The dart language that Flutter employs is syntactically similar to Java, which I have some foundational experience with and therefore Flutter became a natural choice. After going through some Flutter tutorials on YouTube to understand the basics and follow along building simple apps, I decided to build my first app, a To-Do List application. I chose this project for a few reasons, first it was just the right amount of challenge as it would force me to understand how to persist data using the sqflite plugin, work with user inputs as well as build a clean, distraction-free UI but it was also simpler than some other ideas I had and only used 3 pages with some clever routing.

My aim before starting this build was to arrive at a project that I myself would use. I needed it to be minimal, clean, dark (I'm a sucker for dark themes) and yet with pops of colour to differentiate between tasks of different priorities and categories. Presently, I have finished the initial build and the video above showcases all the key features of the application as well as its minimal design.

I am currently working on improving the app - by first adding a reminder system that sends local notifications the user! Drop me a message if you want to know anything about Flutter, give me suggestions about features or you just want to talk about tech and programming!

Here is the link for the GitHub repo where you can view the source code for the project!