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

Distributing apps to desktop app stores

Most desktop OSes now have a central location for discovering and installing applications. Apple created the Mac App Store, Windows has the Microsoft Store, and each Linux distribution has its preferred package manager. Having an application listed in (and hosted by) a platform marketplace significantly increases the number of users you can expect and also reduces the associated hosting costs. When paired with carefully prepared metadata (as described in Chapter 9, Bundling Resources and Preparing for Release), a marketplace can easily become your largest distribution channel.

In this section, we step through the process for the macOS and Windows stores. We will return to Linux and BSD distribution later in the chapter as they are less mainstream and far more complicated.

Mac App Store

The Mac App Store is the desktop version of Apple's famous iOS App Store. It provides many thousands of applications available to buy and download...