I discovered a hidden gem in the Flutter ecosystem this week 💎
Monarch is a developer tool for building Flutter widgets in isolation and its incredibly easy to start using.
1. Write your stories (just widgets)
2. Run Monarch
3. Tweak and debug
Add your onboarding pages, error messages, modals, and just about any other widget you want to quickly iterate on and Monarch lets you see it immediately.
Benefits
🪲 Find bugs fast
🍋 Easily test hard to reach UI states (loading screens, one-time welcome messages, edge cases)
📈 Boost your widget test coverage (all Monarch stories can be reused in tests)
🔥 Iterate with hot reload
Start Coding Declaratively
The biggest benefit of Monarch is that it will indirectly make you write better Flutter code. To write better stories, you'll naturally start making your widget cdoe more "declarative".
The official Flutter docs also have an page called "Start Thinking Declaratively" that speaks to this point.
Get Started
Monarch is open source and available on pub. dev so give it a try!
Since I learned about it at the DC Flutter meetup this past Wednesday, I've set it up in 3 apps and found a handful of bugs that would have been tough to find before.
Our very own @fertrig and @natefrechette will give a talk on building UIs in isolation and using Monarch to the Flutter Charlotte meetup group. If you are in the area, we would love to see you!
https://t.co/USVYrRCBVL
Monarch is now fully open source! !🥹🤩
The latest release of Monarch is open source. It also significantly improves the Monarch architecture.
#Flutter
https://t.co/2DE8UWxZmj
Build accessible #flutter UIs with Monarch. Quickly increase or decrease the text scale factor of your widgets. With Monarch, overflow bugs are easy to find.
Is your #flutter app internationalized? Does it need to support multiple languages or locales?
Monarch is the fastest way to test your internationalization changes. Just annotate your locales in code and select them in the Monarch UI.
https://t.co/61aQV0bpHF
Does your #flutter app have its own custom theme? Monarch can render your stories using your app's custom theme. Just annotate your theme and Monarch will do the rest!
https://t.co/RBio3thtKP