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

Appendix C: Cross-Compiling

When building applications that need access to native APIs and graphics hardware, we can use CGo. Although not much harder to build for regular development, this does make cross compiling much more complicated. For every target platform you want to build for, there must be a C compiler that knows how to create native binary files. This appendix outlines the steps required to set up cross compilation targets for each combination referenced earlier in this book.

Important note

Please note that cross compiling is not required for day-to-day development. For most development, you won't require the cross-compiler setup. The Go compiler and standard tools discussed in Appendix A: Developer Tool Installation, are all that you require to develop for standard computers. This appendix is all about installing additional tools for creating compiled applications for a different operating system or architecture than your current computer.

We will cover two...