flex_color_scheme 3.0.0

A Flutter package to make and use beautiful color scheme based MaterialApp themes.

Changelog

All notable changes to the FlexColorScheme package will be documented in this file.

[3.0.0] - June 25, 2021

• Breaking: The color accentColor is being deprecated in Flutter SDK ThemeData starting from version v2.3.0-0.1.pre. Usage of accentColor in FlexColorScheme is removed to support this transition. The property is deprecated in FlexColorScheme, but is still present. Its usage does however no longer have impact on produced themes, this is a potential breaking change. The probability that you might have used it as a property in your FlexColorScheme based theme is low. It was set before to primary color in FlexColorScheme, as a way to make the highlight color of outlines and underlines on text field boxes primary colored in dark theme mode, and not secondary/accent colored as they used to bve in Flutter's default dark theme mode. The old accentColor was
  not used for anything else in themes anymore when using FlexColorScheme. The property is now going away totally in Flutter SDK. The default ThemeData in Flutter SDK in dark mode now creates a theme for outline and underline indicators on input fields that are based on primary color, just like FlexColorScheme does and already did before. Flutter SDK no longer uses accentColor for it. The resulting default dark mode style on text fields thus now remain unchanged in FlexColorScheme even with this definition removed. If you had used accentColor in FlexColorScheme as a short-cut to define a different text field outline or underline highlight color in dark theme mode than primary color, then you will need to recreate it via text field decoration theming.

• New: The FlexColorScheme.dark and FlexColorScheme.light factories have a new property called swapColors. If true, this will swap primary and primaryVariant colors with their secondary counter-parts.

  This flag can be set to true if you want to make a theme where your primary and secondary colors are swapped compared to their definition. It is useful if you want to quickly swap primary and secondary colors when using the pre-defined color schemes or with computed dark schemes from light schemes. It doubles the variation possibilities of themes based on the pre-defined color schemes.

  If you are explicitly defining all you light or dark scheme colors, you can of course define them in desired order. This feature will still swap whatever colors you defined for primary and secondary when set to true. You can thus also use this feature as an easy end-user modifiable theme option, if you like to offer the capability to toggle the primary and secondary theme colors the other way around.

• New: The static function FlexSchemeColor.effective(FlexSchemeColor colors, int usedColors, {bool swapColors = false}) is used to implement the above swapColors feature. It also exposes the logic behind the FlexColorScheme dark and light theme usedColors property. This static method is helpful if you need to compute effective built-in theme colors externally to FlexColorScheme to present the active theme, based on these settings. This is used by example 5 to change the colors on the theme mode switch when the swap color settings is toggled. The usedColors property is not shown in any bundled example, but it can be used the same way.

• New color schemes: Added four new built-in color schemes.

  • Bahama and trinidad - Bahama blue and trinidad orange colored theme. Use enum value FlexScheme.bahamaBlue for easy access to it.
  • Mallard and valencia - Mallard green and Valencia pink colored theme. Use enum value FlexScheme.mallardGreen for easy access to it.
  • Espresso and crema - Espresso dark brown and crema colored theme. Use enum value FlexScheme.espresso for easy access to it.
  • Outer space stage - Outer space dark blue-grey and stage red theme. Use enum value FlexScheme.outerSpace for easy access to it.

  Inspired by MaterialYou at GoogleIO 2021, I recently hooked up FlexColorScheme with an algorithm that extracts prominent colors from images. Then fed these colors to FlexColorScheme to make themes from them. The above new color schemes in release 3.0.0 came from these image based theme experiments. You can see examples of FlexColorScheme making color schemes and themes from images in my Tweets about it. This was a first quick test of the idea, later I added some more features to it, here and here. This quick test shows that FlexColorScheme is very versatile.

• Tests: Added tests for the new features and removed test related to accentColor. Total 736 tests, coverage 99.76%.

[2.1.1] - March 30, 2021

• Change: Made the VoidCallback onSelect in FlexThemeModeOptionButton nullable. The optional callback allows for the button to be used for example as a trailing widget in a ListTile. Keep it null to not have any callback, nor hover or Ink of its own, and use the select event of the parent instead. When it is used as standalone button you normally want to use this callback, but not if you want the parent to handle it, that use case was not allowed with previous version.

[2.1.0] - March 22, 2021

• Fix: Toggling FlexColorScheme(transparentStatusBar) from true to false, did not restore the Android default status bar scrim, unless the app was completely rebuilt. This has been fixed.
• Fix: When using FlexColorScheme.themedSystemNavigationBar(useDivider) in an AnnotatedRegion, toggling useDivider from true to false, did not remove the system navigation bar divider again, unless the app was completely rebuilt. This has been fixed, see API docs for more info.
• Feature: The FlexColorScheme.themedSystemNavigationBar for styling the system navigation bar got a new convenience property systemNavBarStyle that takes a FlexSystemNavBarStyle enum with values:
  • system: For default white system nav bar in light theme and black in dark theme mode.
  • surface: The system navigation bar will be the same color as active theme colorScheme.surface color. If your FlexColorScheme definition is set to use primary branded surface and background colors, the same primary color blend that the surface color has received will be used.
  • background: The system navigation bar will be the same color as active theme colorScheme.background color. If your FlexColorScheme definition is set to use primary branded surface and background colors, the same primary color blend that the background color has received will be used.
  • scaffoldBackground: The system navigation bar will be the same color as active theme scaffoldBackground color. If your FlexColorScheme definition is set to use primary branded surface and background colors, the same primary color blend that the scaffoldBackground color has received will be used.
  • transparent: An experimental feature. The goal is to make the system navigation bar fully transparent, showing the background, while navigation buttons float over the background. This feature only works if it is also configured in the Android embedder and on SDK 30 or higher. More information in this example: https://github.com/rydmike/sysnavbar
• Examples: Added top status bar scrim toggle, system navigation divider, and navbar style toggles to example 5. These only work on Android builds and do not have any functionality on the live Web builds.
• Tests: Added tests for the new features. Total 690 tests, coverage 99.76%.

[2.0.0] - March 15, 2021

• First stable release of FlexColorScheme with sound null safety.
• Includes the changes from [2.0.0-nullsafety.1] and [2.0.0-nullsafety.2].
• Breaking: The by default enabled divider for FlexColorScheme.themedSystemNavigationBar has been revised to be disabled by default. To use a divider on the top of the system navigation bar on Android, you have to enabled it manually. This is more in line with expected default behaviour.

[2.0.0-nullsafety.2] - March 15, 2021

• Breaking Minor change to the none default tooltipsMatchBackground: true border style, it now uses the theme divider color as its default outline color.
• Breaking: As stated earlier in the documentation, as a planned change for version 2.0.0, the sub theme for FloatingActionButtonThemeData was removed. It is thus now null, just as in a default Flutter ThemeData. It still produces the same theme as before, the ThemeData definition was just no longer needed to do so.
• Features: The static helper FlexColorScheme.themedSystemNavigationBar received three new properties noAppBar, invertStatusIcons and systemNavigationBarDividerColor. The old property nullContextBackground was deprecated and replaced with systemNavigationBarColor. Example 5 has been updated to show how and when these new features can be used.
• Migrated AppBar theming to use the implementation introduced in Flutter 2.0.0 instead of using its own custom implementation for the "white" app bar theme.
• Tests: Number of tests increased from 639 to 661. Coverage 99.78%.
• Documentation: Added thumbnails to Appendix A. This pub.dev version is also to test the thumbnails work and how they look on pub.dev before stable 2.0.0 release.

[2.0.0-nullsafety.1] - February 4, 2021

• First version with null-safety.
• Breaking: Removed the in version 1.3.0 deprecated FlexSchemeSurfaceColors.themeSurface, use FlexSchemeSurfaceColors.surfaceStyle instead.
• Tests: Number of tests were reduced from 723 to 639, when all null related tests were removed.

[1.4.1] - January 31, 2021

• New color schemes: Added four new built-in color schemes.

  • Barossa - Barossa red and cardin green theme. Use enum value FlexScheme.barossa for easy access to it.
  • Shark and orange - Shark grey and orange ecstasy theme. Use enum value FlexScheme.shark for easy access to it.
  • Big stone tulip - Big stone blue and tulip tree yellow theme. Use enum value FlexScheme.bigStone for easy access to it.
  • Damask and lunar - Damask red and lunar green theme. Use enum value FlexScheme.damask for easy access to it.

• Improved: Semantics for the ThemeMode Widget buttons.

• Tests: FlexThemeModeSwitch widget tests, makes and checks for system mode changes.

• Tests: More tests, totally 723 tests, codecov is now > 99.5%.

• CI/CD: Added GitHub actions to automate build and to publish the examples on the Web on a new release.

• Examples: Minor changes to the examples. Modified to not need the late keyword when they are converted to null safe versions.

• Documentation:

  • Added the new color schemes to the documentation.
  • Minor typo corrections.

[1.4.0] - January 18, 2021

• Feature: Added convenience property scheme to FlexColorScheme factories light and dark. This a shortcut for using the built-in color schemes. The colors property can still be used as before. The .light and .dark factories no longer have any required properties. If scheme is not provided it defaults to FlexScheme.material and if both scheme and colors are provided, the scheme provided via colors prevail.

• Examples: Updated the simple example 1 to use the new scheme property, as in theme: FlexColorScheme.light(scheme: FlexScheme.mandyRed).toTheme.

• Feature: Added experimental support for transparent system navigation bar for Android for SDK >= 30 (Android 11). The support is added via new opacity property in FlexColorScheme.themedSystemNavigationBar.

  A separate example that builds on example 5, shows and explains how and when transparent system navigation bar can be used in Android. It also shows how to make it look nice when using primary color branded background color applied to the system navigation bar in Android, that is used when transparency is not supported. While if supported, your app otherwise uses a transparent system navigation. Please see this separate small stand-alone example Android project sysnavbar on GitHub for more information.

• Tests: Added more tests, now 689 tests. All color values used are now also tested, any modification to them is considered a breaking change. A bit more tests would still be nice, for the ThemeModeSwitch Widget at least. Total test coverage > 98%, it will do for now.

• Documentation:

  • Changed example one and the intro, to use the new simpler scheme property when using built-in schemes.
  • Added a section that lists which sub-themes, and which of their properties, are NOT null when creating a theme data object with FlexColorScheme.toTheme.
  • Removed the "back to contents" link after each chapter. It was nice and worked fine on Github, but for some reason it did not on pub.dev.
  • Tried finding and adding comments for the 3 missing API comments needed to reach 100% API documentation comments, not sure if it succeeded. I will see when the update is published.

[1.3.0] - January 7, 2021

• Marked FlexSchemeSurfaceColors.themeSurface as deprecated in favor of the correctly named FlexSchemeSurfaceColors.surfaceStyle version. The older themeSurface will be removed when null safe Version 2.0.0 is officially released as the main version.
• Added Diagnosticable mixin to classes FlexSchemeOnColors, FlexSchemeSurfaceColors and FlexColorScheme, that all also received proper identity overrides and copyWith methods.
• Improved internal null safe behavior, with fall-backs values in some classes and helper functions. It might make migration to null-safety easier.
• Added 389 tests. Coverage is 89% based on Codecov report. Will add more tests later, enough for now.
• The tests will make the migration to null-safety easier by providing some quality control checks.
• Added GitHub actions to run all the tests and automated test coverage analysis with Codecov.
• Documentation improvements and API doc fixes.
  In previous version API doc analysis says "441 out of 444 API elements (99.3 %) have documentation comments.". I have not been able to find any missing ones. The result from this update will only be seen after it has been uploaded, but I doubt it will change much. If somebody happens to find the missing doc comments let my know, the IDE analyser does not find them either.

[1.2.0] - January 4, 2021

• Added four new built-in color schemes.

  • Amber blue - Amber blaze and blue color theme, based on Material amber and blue accent colors. Use enum value FlexScheme.amber for easy access to it.
  • Vesuvius burned - Vesuvius burned orange and eden green theme. Use enum value FlexScheme.vesuviusBurn for easy access to it.
  • Deep purple - Deep purple daisy bush theme, based on Material deepPurple and lightBlueAccent colors. Use enum value FlexScheme.deepPurple for easy access to it.
  • Ebony clay - Ebony clay dark blue-grey and watercourse green colored theme. Use enum value FlexScheme.ebonyClay for easy access to it.

• Added a style option for the tab bar. The FlexColorScheme created tab bar theme now defaults to a TabBarTheme that fits its created AppBarTheme, also works via the factory app bar style options. There is also an optional style that makes the tab bar theme suitable for surface and background colors. This was the default style before. The change to this default style is a fix to make the default TabBarTheme one that fits on app bar's instead, which is expected default behavior in Flutter and Material design. The style is set via the FlexColorScheme property tabBarStyle using enum values FlexTabBarStyle.forAppBar (default) and FlexTabBarStyle.forBackground.

• The themed AppBar and BottomAppBar elevations still default to 0. However, and for convenience, the themed values can now both be modified directly via the FlexColorScheme properties appBarElevation and bottomAppBarElevation, without need to change these frequently modified values with an extra copyWith to get them re-themed as desired. When using the recommended FlexColorScheme.light and FlexColorScheme.dark factories, appBarElevation defaults to '0', if not defined and bottomAppBarElevation defaults to appBarElevation, if not defined. When using the default constructor (the factories are recommended), they both default to '0'.

Example updates

• All examples: The widget showcase now show the resulting themed tab bar on two different backgrounds, one on the app bar color and one on background color. This can guide you in which tab bar style is right for your use case.
• Example 4 and 5: The sub-page now has a demo tab bar in the app bar, and a demo bottom navigation bar.
• Example 5: Now includes a toggle that can be used to select the tab bar theme style.
• Example 5: Now includes a slider to modify the themed app bar elevation.
• Example 5: Fixed so that the Roboto font, that is always used by the examples regardless of platform, now also gets used when you toggle to create the theme from the scheme with the ThemeData.from(colorScheme). It looked a bit ood when it changed to platform default font on Desktop and Web versions, and FlexColorScheme.toTheme used Roboto. This was modified so that the resulting themes use the same font and are comparable.

[1.1.1] - December 31, 2020

• Updated example 5 to include UI that can be used to vary the computed dark themes white blend percentage level. This was added to better demonstrate the toDark feature.
• Added a defaultError fix/modifier that enables the built-in schemes to use the Material design guide's default dark error color when using the toDark method to compute a dark scheme from a light scheme, that already defines a light scheme error color. The toDark method can be used without the defaultError scheme modifier as well, but then the dark error color also change with the other computed dark scheme colors when using the "Compute dark theme" feature and the level adjustment. This is not necessarily the desired behavior. The fix enables the alternative more often desired behavior and ensures that the dark error color just uses the default value. For custom schemes that do not specify a custom error color for their light scheme and thus default to the Material Guide's standard error color, the fix is not needed. Example 5 demonstrates the use case of defaultError as well.
• Major documentation review and updates.

[1.1.0] - December 29, 2020

• Added API to make a matching dark scheme from a light scheme. See FlexSchemeColor.toDark.
• Added a showSystemMode property to FlexThemeModeSwitch. It defaults to true. Set it to false, to exclude the system setting based theme mode option.
• Added static method FlexColorScheme.comfortablePlatformDensity.
• Added static method FlexColorScheme.themedSystemNavigationBar that can be used to assist with theming the system navigation bar via an annotated region. See updated example 5, for a demo on how to use it.
• Added API property FlexColorScheme.transparentStatusBar to allow opting out of the one-toned AppBar in Android.
• Updated the examples.
  • All examples now use the new platform adaptive FlexColorScheme.comfortablePlatformDensity as their visualDensity setting. The Flutter default compact mode for desktop and web goes a bit overboard in its compactness. This optional setting presents an alternative where comfortable density is used on desktops and Web, while devices keep their standard visual density. Just omit the setting if you prefer Flutter's super compact Web and Desktop widgets.
  • Example 3 excludes the system theme mode option, just to show this new feature of the switch.
  • Example 4 includes all built-in schemes, plus 3 custom ones, including one where the dark scheme is made with the toDark method. Example 4 also includes a sub-page that can be opened to see the same theme on a new page.
  • Example 5 now includes an option make all the dark mode schemes with the toDark option, so it can be toggled and compared to the hand-tuned versions. The same custom color scheme as in example 4 are also included. Example 5 also has the same sub-page as example 4. Example 5 now also show how to solve the issue that the system navigation bar does not get color scheme and theme mode appropriate system navigation bar style in Android as we change the color scheme and theme mode. This is done with an AnnotatedRegion and the new helper method FlexColorScheme.themedSystemNavigationBar.
• Documentation updates and typo corrections.

[1.0.0] - December 21, 2020

• Version 1.0.0 released
• Documentation layout updates and typo corrections.

[1.0.0-dev.2] - December 21, 2020

• Made planned API name changes, SchemeOnColors -> FlexSchemeOnColors and SchemeSurfaceColors -> FlexSchemeSurfaceColors. These are lower level APIs that are only used when making custom on and surface colors. Changed ThemeModeOptionButton -> FlexThemeModeOptionButton, this is also a lower level API that can be used when making more advanced custom theme selection control that are based on the same button as the FlexThemeModeSwitch uses.
• Exposed planned configuration APIs for the FlexThemeModeSwitch and FlexThemeModeOptionButton.
• Removed the constants that had no function in the public interface from the API.
• Documentation updates and corrections.
• Removed legacy usage of deprecated ThemeData properties textSelectionColor, cursorColor and textSelectionHandleColor. They are no longer needed even for stable channel, they were useful earlier but not anymore, using only TextSelectionThemeData is enough in the latest stable version.

[1.0.0-dev.1] - December 17, 2020

• First development pre-release on pub.dev.

---

Planned Updates and New Features

These are the topics I currently have on the TODO list for this package. Have a new suggestion and idea? Feel free to open a suggestion or issue in the repo.

TODO

• Version 2.2.0 Release even more color schemes. Making schemes is fun, documenting the changes a bit less so.

• WIP: (add test) ThemeData.accentColor is deprecated starting in v2.3.0-0.1.pre. When that lands in stable channel an update is needed to remove the usage of accentColor as a way to set the InputDecorator color to default to colorScheme.primary in both dark and light theme mode.

  Based on a quick look at the modified code in the SDK to support the removal of ThemeData.accentColor, it seems like the new default for dak theme mode is also now the primary color. In the past it was using the accentColor as default color for input decorators in dark theme mode. This was not inline with newer Material Design. FlexColorScheme currently corrects this by modifying the ThemeData.accentColor to be same as colorScheme.primary. This worked since the only widget in FlexColorScheme based ThemeData that used the ThemeData.accentColor was the InputDecorator, all other widgets that required the accentColor already uses colorScheme.secondary. It looks like the fixe for FlexColorScheme when it lands in stable will just be to deprecate its usage of accentColor but default behavior should still remain unchanged from current defaults.

• Elevated surfaces for

• To dark scheme add a swap primary/secondary flag.

• Add a use actual Material color shades for the light/dark mode, when a Material color is selected. Make this new default and keep old around as option.

• Find the color algo google uses on it Material colors site here https://material.io/design/color/the-color-system.html#tools-for-picking-colors and here https://material.io/resources/color/#!/?view.left=0&view.right=0&primary.color=582aed&secondary.color=00B0FF

Starting points for the algo: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32942503/material-design-color-palette https://github.com/Hammwerk/material-color-palette

Interesting and simpler Ant design: https://2x.ant.design/docs/spec/colors

Tools: https://onextrapixel.com/best-tools-generate-color-palettes/

COMPLETED

• Version 2.0.0 Release official null-safe version, when nullsafety is available in Flutter stable channel.
• Version 2.0.0-nullsafety.2: Minor new APIs and features added. Example 5 updated.
• This #71184 landed in Flutter 2.0.0. The past custom "white" AppBarTheme implementation was as planned changed to the new one that is supported by the SDK.
• Version 2.0.0-nullsafety.1 released
• Version 1.4.1 Added automated build and publish pipes for the Web examples!
• Version 1.4.1 More tests, tests are now considered sufficient for current features.
• Version 1.4.0: Increased unit and widget test to 689 tests. All color definitions are now also tested to ensure they will not be changed by any accidental edit. Test coverage is higher than 95%, certainly sufficient for this type of package, but there are still some areas that could and will be improved.
• Version 1.3.0: Added 195 unit and widgets tests, mostly unit tests.
• API to assist with themed annotated region for system navigation bar theming.
• API to opt-out from one-toned AppBar and return it to Android's default two-toned.
• Add API that allows us to use an additional extra color definition for ThemeData.accentColor to easily make themes with custom input border color in dark-mode.
• Add API the can create the dark scheme based on a light scheme's colors.
• Release version 1.0.0 on pub.dev.
• Review and correct documentation mistakes and typos, first pass anyway.
• Review and update the API.
• Publish live Web versions of the five examples.
• Complete the documentation.
• Release first version 1.0.0-dev.1 publicly on GitHub and pub.dev.

MAYBE

• Companion Web App
  I started playing with a small companion app that will allow you to design FlexColorSchemes and copy-paste the needed setup code into an app. If/when I finnish it, I will release it as live version with open source code as well.

• Branded surface customization Add API offering more flexibility and customization capabilities to the surface branding.

• Serialization of FlexColorScheme
  Including built-in serialization of FlexColorScheme, and its key classes has been suggested. I consider FlexColorScheme to be functionally on a level similar to ColorScheme, and therefore it should not cover serialization of itself. Serialization have to deal with a lot of potential failure points that I think should not have to be a concern in this type of component. I am not planning to add it, not yet at least, I might reconsider this later.

  My recommendation for saving the state of a FlexColorScheme is to include values for its settings that you use in your implementation in other models in your application, like an "AppSettings" model or similar. You probably serialize and store such data already, perhaps with shared preferences, hive, get_storage or some other solution. Include the values you need for your FlexColorScheme implementation in your stored settings and then use those values to restore your FlexColorScheme configuration and theme. This way, your implementation also remain in control of what it needs to store and restore.