What's new in the Google Maps Flutter plugin

Summary

In this energetic and community-focused update, the Google Maps Platform team shares their latest features in the Google Maps Flutter plugin. They've introduced enhancements such as map styling IDs, marker clustering, customizable marker sizes, and heat map layers. The team emphasizes their commitment to listening to user requests via GitHub issues, encouraging users to provide feedback and help shape the plugin's roadmap. The announcement also highlights the integration of a new browser-based IDE called IDX, showcasing its seamless capabilities for Flutter app development. Tune in to stay updated on further upcoming features and improvements.

Highlights

• Google Maps for Flutter is jamming with new features like map styling and clustering! 🎶
• Map IDs and marker clustering are now part of the Google Maps Flutter toolkit. 🚀
• Contributors helped bring heat map layers to the plugin—thanks, Rexio 80! 🔥
• IDX, the new IDE from Google, brings in-browser Flutter development to your fingertips. 💻
• Check the GitHub road map and changelog for the latest on what's cooking! 🍽️

Key Takeaways

• The Google Maps Flutter plugin team is dropping new features like hot tracks! 🎶
• Major updates include map styling, marker clustering, and heat map support. 🗺️
• Community input plays a huge role in shaping these updates through GitHub. 💬
• There's a cool new IDE in town, IDX, offering browser-based Flutter dev. 🚀
• Stay tuned to GitHub and YouTube for the latest features and tips. 📢

Overview

It’s been quite the year for the Google Maps Flutter plugin crew! They’ve been busy releasing new features instead of albums, and they’re listening closely to community requests. The highlights? Map styling, new marker features, and heat map support are now hitting the stage! If your favorite feature didn’t make the cut, don’t fret—check out their GitHub for a peek at what’s next.

First up in our feature lineup is the introduction of map IDs for customizing your map’s appearance in your Flutter app. This nifty update lets you tie a Google map widget to your cloud-based map style with ease. Meanwhile, marker clustering addresses the pain of overcrowded maps, letting you tidy things up especially when targeting Android, iOS, and web platforms. 🌍

Another crowd-pleaser, the ability to customize marker sizes, brings more flexibility to multi-platform development. And let's not forget the hotly-requested heat map layers, thanks to community contributions making their way into the Flutter fold. The Google Maps team is all ears on GitHub, encouraging ongoing community collaboration to keep the features flowing.

What's new in the Google Maps Flutter plugin Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 it's been a rocking year but instead of releasing new songs and albums like musicians we've been releasing new features to the Google Maps for flutter plugin the Google Maps platform team is excited to tell you that the hits will keep on coming and we're taking requests today I'll talk about map styling new markers features and heat map support if the feature you're looking for isn't covered today check our GitHub issue Linked In the description below where we publish the road map of what's coming we build this
• 00:30 - 01:00 road map based off of the requests that people have upvoted the most so I encourage you to use GitHub issues to file bugs and request features and use those thumbs up emojis or comment on issues that you want to upvote for all the new features I'm mentioning today be sure to check the Google Maps flutter page on pub. to check which version number of the feature is available in and what the minimum requirements are to use that feature in my first splutter video I used Android Studio to edit files and emulate the running app app on
• 01:00 - 01:30 an Android device today I'm going to try out a new IDE from Google called idx that can emulate flutter apps from within your browser you can use any IDE but because of the in browser capabilities of idx you'll soon see links to open our flutter code samples in idx on the Google Maps platform developer site okay first up we had to add support for map IDs a map ID is an identifier that's set up in your console to associate a map with a the custom
• 01:30 - 02:00 style that you've selected for the map you can read more about cloud-based map styling at the link in the description this map ID is key to several of the latest features in our mapss case so it's pretty important to be able to specify it in your flutter app it's a property of a Google map widget and the property is called cloud map ID in my last video I left off with adding a marker to a map but once you learn how to add one marker you'll have situations that call for hundreds or
• 02:00 - 02:30 thousands of markers and your map will get very crowded for that problem one of our top feature requests has been to support marker clustering we added dependencies on the utility libraries for each respective SDK which provide marker clustering and you can now cluster markers when targeting all three platforms Android iOS and web to learn how to implement marker clustering in your flutter app I recommend looking at the example Dart file included in the
• 02:30 - 03:00 GitHub repository people also wanted to be able to customize the size of markers on a map there was a lot of discussion in this feature thread especially since flutter is a crossplatform framework and different bit Maps appear at different sizes on Android than they look on iOS devices in the end we figured it out and added two new classes asset map bitmap to create a bitmap descriptor for a marker from an asset image and bytes map bitmap to create a a bitmap descriptor
• 03:00 - 03:30 for a marker from an array of bytes and code it as a PNG so now you have four ways to create a custom marker icon and you can specify image dimensions and scaling or pixel ratios to fine-tune the size finally another one of our highly requested features is support for heat map layers as seen in the maps JavaScript API and the utility libraries for the maps sdks for Android and iOS thank you to community contributor rexio 80 for
• 03:30 - 04:00 implementing this one for the flutter Community this pull request had 143 commits over 2 years to get merged thank you for sticking with us through all the code reviews as you can see we're shaping this package together which is one of the best things about flutter and open source I hope you're happy using these highly requested new features and I hope you'll continue telling us what's important to you through our conversations on GitHub we've got a few more features and fixes in the pipeline
• 04:00 - 04:30 for the rest of this year so watch that change log to see what's new And subscribe to the Google Maps platform YouTube channel for announcements and tips until next time happy mapping [Music]