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

Manually installing compilers

Installing compilers and toolchains is complex, but this appendix will attempt to guide you through the main steps. This approach is sometimes preferred by developers who want to manage every single detail of their computer. It may also be easier if your computer has previously been used for C development and creating native apps for multiple platforms.

Preparing to build for a different target varies, depending on the system you want to compile for. We'll start by looking at macOS, before exploring Windows and Linux afterward. It is not necessary to follow these steps to build mobile apps since we installed these tools in Appendix B: Installing Mobile Build Tools.

Cross compiling for macOS

When cross compiling for macOS, it's necessary to install the Software Development Kit (SDK) from Apple, as well as a suitable compiler. The instructions for Windows (using MSYS2, as described in Appendix A, Developer Tool Installation) and Linux...