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

Challenges with multiple native GUIs


In this chapter, we've seen how a single code base can create applications that work with native widget toolkits across multiple platforms. This is a very powerful approach to quickly develop graphical apps that are consistent with the platform style to provide a familiar user experience. However, this approach also has challenges you may need to overcome for your project.

Consistent style

While it may not be obvious that a consistent style is important when choosing to adapt to the native toolkit, there are many parameters involved in style and application design. Does your design team or product specialist have defined standards or approaches to user experience that they wish to apply across all applications and platforms? Are there brand guidelines that you should be including in your interface design?

Brand styles

As andlabs UI is a toolkit that aims to provide an abstraction to standard widgets (and therefore using the current platform's look and feel...