Elevate Your App’s User Experience with Custom Animations

Getting Started

Before diving into the world of animations, ensure you have a solid understanding of Dart and Flutter app development. You’ll also need a suitable IDE of your choice.

Building Simple Animations with Tween

Tween is a fundamental class in Flutter that allows you to animate a widget by specifying its beginning and ending values. With Tween, you can animate various properties of a widget, such as its size or color, by defining the initial and final values of the property.

For example, let’s say you want to proportionally increase the height and width of a container from 50px to 200px. Here’s how you can achieve this using Tween:

Tween(begin: 50, end: 200).animate(CurvedAnimation(parent: animation, curve: Interval(0, 1, curve: Curves.easeInOut)));

Building Complex, Staggered Animations

Sometimes, you may want to animate a widget in a way that multiple things happen simultaneously, such as increasing its size, changing its color, and sliding some text into the container. To achieve this, you can create a controller for each animation and trigger them sequentially.

However, managing multiple animation controllers can be cumbersome. That’s where staggered animation comes in – it connects all the animations to one controller, making it easier to manage and reconfigure.

Configuring One Controller for Animation Order Management

Now, let’s take a look at how to configure one controller to manage the order of multiple animations. In this example, we’ll create an animation that increases the size of a circle, changes its color, and slides some text into the circle.

// Create a controller
AnimationController _controller = AnimationController(
  duration: const Duration(milliseconds: 2000),
  vsync: this,
);

// Create animations
Animation _sizeAnimation = Tween(begin: 50, end: 200).animate(_controller);
Animation _colorAnimation = ColorTween(begin: Colors.red, end: Colors.green).animate(_controller);
Animation _textAnimation = Tween(begin: Offset.zero, end: Offset(100, 0)).animate(_controller);

// Trigger the animations
_controller.forward();

Building Routing Animations in Flutter

Routing animations can enhance the user experience when navigating between screens. One way to achieve this is by using the pageflipbuilder package, which provides an interactive widget flipper that flips screens, cards, containers, images, and any other kind of widget with a fixed size.

Building Shake or Bounce Animations

Shake and bounce animations are popular effects used in many apps. You can achieve these animations using the Transform.translate constructor and the Curves.bounceOut class.

Animation _shakeAnimation = Tween(begin: Offset.zero, end: Offset(10, 0)).animate(CurvedAnimation(parent: animation, curve: Curves.bounceOut));

Building Animations with Flutter Hooks

Flutter Hooks can simplify the process of building animations by reducing boilerplate code and improving code reusability. With Flutter Hooks, you can create animations without having to manage the controller and animations in the initState and dispose methods.

Building Themed Animation Transitions

Providing users with the ability to switch between different themes is a common feature in many apps. You can achieve this by manually configuring the values for each theme option or by integrating packages that provide these features.

// Define theme options
ThemeData _lightTheme = ThemeData(brightness: Brightness.light);
ThemeData _darkTheme = ThemeData(brightness: Brightness.dark);

// Create an animation for theme transition
Animation _themeAnimation = ColorTween(begin: _lightTheme.primaryColor, end: _darkTheme.primaryColor).animate(_controller);

// Trigger the theme transition
_controller.forward();

Animations can elevate your app’s user experience and engage your users. However, it’s essential to note that implementing an excessive number of animations can be distracting and affect your app’s performance. By tweaking the values used to configure the animations discussed in this article, you can create unique animations and transitions that suit your preferences and the experience you want for your users.