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 chat app user interface

A common example of graphical applications, especially in a mobile context, is the messaging app. Although there are many messaging apps now, they often share the design of colored textboxes scrolling back through time. They are also either left or right aligned (with some padding for emphasis) to show incoming messages as distinct from outgoing. In this example, we will implement the message component to show text in this way and apply a custom theme to give the app an identity.

Creating a message widget

We start with the message widget that is used to display a single message. Each message will have a body of text and the name of the person who sent the message. Using the sender name, we can determine whether the message is outgoing. To begin, we define a custom Widget type that will hold this data in a new file, message.go:

  1. To create a custom widget, we define a new type, named message, that extends widget.BaseWidget. We add to...