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

Anatomy of a Fyne application

As we saw in Chapter 2, The Future According to Fyne, the toolkit took the opportunity to start from scratch, throwing away the old and sometimes confusing constraints of previous toolkits. As a result, the APIs need to define everything involved in building a graphical application. In this section, we will explore the main concepts in running a Fyne-based application and producing visible components on screen, starting with the application itself.

Application

The application, defined in the fyne.App interface, models the capabilities of a Fyne-based application. Each app using Fyne will typically create and run a single fyne.App instance from within their main() function. Because of the way that graphical applications work, they must be started from the main function and not through a goroutine or other background thread.

To create an app instance, we make use of the app package within Fyne, which can be imported using fyne.io/fyne/v2/app. This...