The Flutter team have released a new tool. Mix is described as providing a way to build Flutter design systems expressively and effortlessly.

Flutter is Google's open source mobile UI framework for crafting  native interfaces on iOS and Android. It was created as a combination of Google's Dart programming language and a runtime environment that is referred to as an app engine in Flutter.

The developers say Mix offers primitive building blocks to help developers and designers create beautiful and consistent user interfaces for their applications. The underlying aim is to make even complex design systems easily maintainable and scalable.

The concept underlying Mix is the use of a design system, a set of standards to be followed throughout the user interface to maintain consistency. In general, developers creating for Android follow the Material Design guidelines, for iOS use the Human Interface Guidelines, and for Windows follow Fluent Design System.

Mix is designed to offer developers a way to make their applications stand out from the apps following the traditional design systems in a similar way to the techniques used by big name brands.

Flutter has a Theme option that can be used for consistency across user interfaces but it doesn’t have an effect on all visual attributes, and Flutter widgets favor composition over inheritance.

Mix combines the use of the composition style of Flutter with inheritance for all attributes. It provides a simple API to compose design and layout attributes for widgets that can easily be extended, overridden, and combined. Mix uses utilities, functions that make it easier to compose an attribute. It also uses decorators, attributes that aren't usually part of a widget but that provide a way to specify the details of the 'missing' attributes.  Directives are used to modify the properties a widget does have, along with Design Tokens for attributes such as colors, text styles, and spacing. The advantage of using design tokens is that you can use the context reference values.

The team says that one of the most powerful features of Mix is the variant. These help in making the design system more flexible and reusable. A variant can be used for overriding certain properties of a Mix and it only applies to the widget(s) implementing the variant.

Flutter Mix is available now. 

More Information

Flutter Website

Flutter Mix Website

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