Book Image

Building Cross-Platform GUI Applications with Fyne

By : Andrew Williams
5 (1)
Book Image

Building Cross-Platform GUI Applications with Fyne

5 (1)
By: Andrew Williams

Overview of this book

The history of graphical application development is long and complicated, with various development challenges that persist to this day. The mix of technologies involved and the need to use different programming languages led to a very steep learning curve for developers looking to build applications across multiple platforms. In Building Cross-Platform GUI Applications with Fyne, you'll understand how the Go language, when paired with a modern graphical toolkit such as Fyne, can overcome these issues and make application development much easier. To provide an easy-to-use framework for cross-platform app development, the Fyne project offers many graphical concepts and design principles that are outlined throughout this book. By working through five example projects, you'll learn how to build apps effectively, focusing on each of the main areas, including the canvas, layouts, file handling, widgets, data binding, and themes. The book will also show you how the completed applications can then be run on your desktop computer, laptop, and smartphone. After completing these projects, you will discover how to prepare applications for release and distribute them to platform marketplaces and app stores. By the end of this book, you'll be able to create cross-platform graphical applications with visually appealing user interfaces and concise code.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Section 1: Why Fyne? The Reason for Being and a Vision of the Future
4
Section 2: Components of a Fyne App
10
Section 3: Packaging and Distribution

Checking for UI hints

As Fyne is built using Material Design principles, it is possible to make use of their recommendations for good and bad ways to use certain components and how you should and shouldn't combine elements for a great UX.

Built into the Fyne toolkit is the concept of hints. These are suggestions that widgets and other components can make about how an app could make changes to offer an improved user interface.

We will start exploring what these hints can offer by creating a simple example tab container application. This code snippet will load two tabs into a tab container (the makeTabs() function). We then include a main() function that will load a new app, create a window, and set the tabs to be its content. The function then runs our app in the usual way as follows:

package main
import (
    "fyne.io/fyne/v2/app"
    "fyne.io/fyne/v2/container"
    "fyne.io/fyne/v2/theme...