Beam Project Documentation

Overview

This is a Flutter project aimed at providing a seamless web experience of the Beam website within a mobile application. It leverages the power of Flutter for cross-platform development, ensuring a consistent user interface and user experience across iOS and Android platforms.

Features

Custom WebView: Integrates a custom web view for displaying web content within the app. This includes handling video playback, theme changes, and reloading web content dynamically.
Theme Management: Supports dark and light themes, with the ability to detect and apply the user's preferred theme automatically.
Welcome Sheet: Displays a welcome sheet on the first launch, enhancing the user experience for new users.

Key Components

WebView Customization

The BeamWebview widget, is central to the project. It encapsulates the functionality for displaying web content, handling theme changes, and managing video playback within the app.

Video Playback Customization: Removes the default video play icon and sets a transparent poster or a black background for video tags.
Theme Change Polling: Periodically checks for theme changes and communicates with the Flutter app to apply the new theme.
Welcome Sheet: Determines if the welcome sheet has been shown to the user and displays it accordingly.

Theme Management

The ThemeProvider class, manages the theme for the application. It initializes the theme based on the user's website settings and dynamically changes as the sites theme changes.

Platform-Specific Configurations

iOS: The iOS platform configuration is found in the Podfile and the permissions in info.plist
Android: Android-specific settings, including the application ID and API keys, are defined in android/app/google-services.json.

Code Organization

Main Entry Point: lib/main.dart serves as the entry point of the application, where the Flutter app is initialized and run.
Screens: The lib/screens directory contains the UI components of the app, including the custom web view and welcome sheet.
Widgets: Reusable widgets are located in lib/widgets, allowing for a modular and maintainable codebase.
Keystore: There will be a file key.properties under android and it should contain details to the keystore used to sign the app

storePassword=...
keyPassword=...
keyAlias=upload
storeFile=/path/to/upload-keystore.jks

Development Setup

Flutter Environment: Ensure you have Flutter installed and set up on your development machine.
Dependencies: Install the project dependencies by running flutter pub get in the project root directory.
iOS Setup: Navigate to the ios directory and run pod install to set up the iOS project.
Android Setup: Ensure the google-services.json file is correctly placed in the android/app directory for Firebase services.

Running the App

iOS: Open the ios/Runner.xcworkspace in Xcode and run the project on a simulator or physical device.
Android: Open the project in Android Studio and run the app on an emulator or physical device.

License

Yet to be decided

kelvinpraises/beam