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 an image browser application

This application will load a directory that contains some images, provide a summary of the content in a status bar at the bottom of the window, and use most of the space to show each image. The images will be loaded as thumbnails (smaller versions of the images) and we will display the image information under each thumbnail.

Creating the layout

To start this example, we will create the layout of the application and the image items that will display in the central grid. Let's understand each of these actions in detail:

  1. First, we set up the image items. We wish to have the image name underneath the image. While this could be positioned manually, the items will be more responsive to changes in size if we use BorderLayout. We will create a canvas.Text element in the bottom position and use canvas.Rectangle to represent the image that we will load later:
    func makeImageItem() fyne.CanvasObject {
         label...