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

Storing data using the Preferences API

It is a common requirement for applications to store many pieces of information, such as user configuration options, current input field contents, and a history of opened files. Using files to store this information would require additional code to format the information for storage; using a database would require additional servers or dependencies for an application. To help with this, Fyne provides a Preferences API, similar to those used by iOS and Android developers.

Data that is stored as Fyne preferences can be accessed by any code in an application using a specific string identifier, known as a key. Each value that is stored has a specific type, so developers do not have to handle any conversion or type checking. Any time that this data changes, it will be saved for future use.

In this section, we'll learn how to manage data using the Preferences API and see how we can avoid having to manually manage user data.

Get and set...