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

Installing on Microsoft Windows

Configuring a development environment for Windows can be complicated as there aren't many tools installed by default. Due to this, there are many options for setting up, including using external tools and packages (such as MSYS2, MinGW, and Windows Subsystem for Linux). However, exploring these is outside the scope of this book.

The following steps show you how to get up and running using MSYS2, which provides a dedicated command-line application that will be set up for Fyne development. Let's get started:

  1. You will need to download the installer from www.msys2.org. You should choose either the 32-bit (i686) or 64-bit (x86_64) version, depending on your computer architecture.
  2. Once downloaded, run the installer, which will download the basic packages on your computer, including the package manager (pacman).
  3. Once the installation is complete, you'll be given the opportunity to launch the MSYS Command Promptplease...