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

Packaging applications (desktop and mobile)

To incorporate the metadata prepared in the preceding sections, we need to execute the packaging phase. This will take the standard Go application binary and attach or embed the required data based on the operating specifics. As each platform requires different data formats and produces different resulting file structures, we use the fyne tool once again to take care of the details.

Packaging for your current computer

To create a package from a Fyne project, we use the fyne package command. By default, this will create an application bundle or executable for the current operating system. When run on macOS this will create a .app bundle; on Windows it will be a .exe file (with additional metadata); on Linux it creates a .tar.gz file that can be used to install the app.

It is possible to build this for a different system as well, using the -os parameter, which we will explore later in this chapter.

Before packaging, it is a good...