Flutter For Dummies

Chapter 3

“Hello” from Flutter

IN THIS CHAPTER

Running your first Flutter app

Adding text and images

Improving your app’s layout

♪ “Hello, I Must Be Going” ♪

BERT KALMAR AND HARRY RUBY, SUNG BY GROUCHO MARX, IN ANIMAL CRACKERS, 1930

The word hello is a relative newcomer in the English language. Its first known use in print was in the Norwich, Connecticut, Courier in 1826. Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, believed that phone calls should start with the term Ahoy! but, apparently, Thomas Edison preferred Hello, and early telephone books recommended Edison’s choice.

According to legend, the first computer program to print nothing but “Hello world!” was written by Brian Kernighan, as part of the BCPL programming language documentation. The first public appearance of such a program was in Kernighan and Ritchie’s 1972 book, The C Programming Language. Nowadays, the term Hello world program, or simply Hello program, applies to any dirt-simple code for someone’s first exposure to a new language or new framework.

This chapter features a simple “Hello world” Flutter program and several embellishments. You can run the code, dissect it, change it, and have fun with it. ...