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

Creating a component from scratch

Instead of building a new component by extending an existing widget, as we did in the previous section, we could build one from scratch. Any component that implements the fyne.Widget interface can be used as a widget in a Fyne application. To ease development, there is a widget.BaseWidget definition that we can inherit from. Let's start by defining the behavior of a new widget—the three-state checkbox.

Defining widget behavior

The API of a Fyne widget is based on behavior rather than how it looks. To begin our widget development, we will therefore define the states that our three-state checkbox can take and how a user can interact with it. We will create threestate.go and start coding:

  1. Firstly, we must define a new type, CheckState, which will hold the three different states of our new checkbox widget. As we are building a reusable component, it is a good idea to export the types that are required, such as CheckState and the...