Understanding Flutter Versions
So now that we have a basic idea about what Flutter is and how it roughly works, it's important to understand Flutter is versioned. Flutter is relatively new, it's been around for a couple of years but especially over the last year, it got a lot of traction and it's really pushed by Google now and therefore Flutter versions are changing frequently.
Now this does not mean however that Flutter changes all the time, that everything about Flutter changes all the time. Instead, indeed Flutter actually is pretty stable and the core API, the core features which you therefore also learned about in this course will not change.
Instead, new versions bring bug fixes, small improvements, often also some behind the scenes changes which you don't even see and maybe also some new niche features. So maybe some new features which you don't directly need in your app or which now allow you to implement something in a different way than you did it before but your old way also still works but you could now also use a different way, these are typically the things that change. And therefore, you will of course also see that in this course, I record a certain video with version let's say 1.6 and you're viewing the course when the latest version is 1.9
but this does not mean that what you learn is not accurate anymore. Instead this course is fully up-to-date and I will keep it up-to-date and actually, I already did replace all the videos in the course once to improve the overall course quality and reflect a couple of important new features.
I wouldn't have needed to do so because what I taught still was right, as I mentioned it's not like everything changing all the time but there were some things that could now be done in an easier way since I recorded my first version of this course when Flutter was still in beta. Now it's been stable for a while and therefore, no large changes are to be expected but whenever something does change or does need updating, I will keep the scores up-to-date. And now that we have that out of the way, it's time to set up Flutter, set up the development environment for Flutter and build our first little Flutter application. And as a side note, the next videos actually are from my first version of this course, therefore there, you still see the beta version of Flutter.
The setup hasn't changed a bit, the look of the website has changed a tiny bit but the steps are the same, the result is the same, that's why I kept these videos around, they're 100% accurate. Nonetheless but really keep this version thing in mind and whenever something changes and doesn't work anymore, I will fix it and update it, no worries. So with that, let's build our first Flutter app and see how Flutter actually works and how we can build Flutter applications together.