Book Image

Hands-On GUI Application Development in Go

By : Andrew Williams
Book Image

Hands-On GUI Application Development in Go

By: Andrew Williams

Overview of this book

Go is often compared to C++ when it comes to low-level programming and implementations that require faster processing, such as Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs). In fact, many claim that Go is superior to C++ in terms of its concurrency and ease of use. Most graphical application toolkits, though, are still written using C or C++, and so they don't enjoy the benefits of using a modern programming language such as Go. This guide to programming GUIs with Go 1.11 explores the various toolkits available, including UI, Walk, Shiny, and Fyne. The book compares the vision behind each project to help you pick the right approach for your project. Each framework is described in detail, outlining how you can build performant applications that users will love. To aid you further in creating applications using these emerging technologies, you'll be able to easily refer to code samples and screenshots featured in the book. In addition to toolkit-specific discussions, you'll cover more complex topics, such as how to structure growing graphical applications, and how cross-platform applications can integrate with each desktop operating system to create a seamless user experience. By delving into techniques and best practices for organizing and scaling Go-based graphical applications, you'll also glimpse Go's impressive concurrency system. In the concluding chapters, you'll discover how to distribute to the main desktop marketplaces and distribution channels. By the end of this book, you'll be a confident GUI developer who can use the Go language to boost the performance of your applications.
Table of Contents (25 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
Comparison of GUI Toolkits
Index

Notifications and task status


As we saw earlier, it's part of most toolkit APIs to provide easy ways to open dialog windows for displaying information, progress reports, and errors to gain a user's attention. However, with great power comes great responsibility; it's important to not interrupt the workflow unless it's really necessary. Think of the many File download complete! or Please wait for update to download... dialog windows you've had to wait for or dismiss and you'll be thinking in the right direction.

So what's the solution? Let's look at how to present non-critical alerts or background progress to the user in a less obstructive manner.

Minor alerts

Many messages that should be presented to the user probably aren't crucial and so should probably not interrupt their flow. The information may not be important enough to warrant displaying another window or it may be time-based, and so if the app isn't active, it may no longer be relevant when they come back. A better approach to this...