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

Implementing a simple game

In the first example application of this book, we will see how the canvas elements come together by building the graphical elements of a snake game (for a history of this game, see the Wikipedia entry at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_(video_game_genre). The main element of this game is a snake character that the user will control as it moves around the screen. We will build the snake from a row of rectangles and add animation elements to bring it to life. Let's start by drawing the initial screen.

Drawing a snake on screen

To start the work of displaying the game canvas, we will see create a simple snake that consists of a row of 10 green squares. Let's begin:

  1. Firstly, we will create a setup function that will build the game screen. We will call this function setupGame and create an empty list that we will populate. The return from this method is a container with no layout so that we can later use a manual layout for the visual...