Fyne, I'll do it myself: Adventures in Desktop App development

Almost a year ago, I wrote about I was really trying hard to get into Desktop GUI apps development here, and someone suggested me to try Fyne.

Which I did, and wrote some first impressions about it in here.

I said there that the docs weren't really clear and some stuff felt a bit hacky to do, which it is totally still the case, but since then many things have changed.

I tested Avalonia and loved it.

I even wrote an article here on how I wrote in just under 2 months a multiplatform password manager application, which builds on github action and works on Mac/Win and Linux.
Muscurd-i is the app, and the codebase is quite huge to be such a simple application.

Few weeks ago instead I got my coding mojo back and hacked a bit around with rust, vlang and went back to study go once again (I wrote about it in here also).

This is the way I learn programming languages, I do side projects and since then I felt like I had to give fyne another go.

I finally completed the todo application which I was mentioning on the post before, and I was quite silly not to see why it didn't work before codebase is here.

Now it all works like a charm, and since I was on a roll I decided to give a try to move my password manager to Fyne and golang.

I did.

It took me only 2 days to reach feature parity and a couple of hours to setup a set of github action to build the binaries.

This is the repo.
This is what the latest release page looks like here.

The only thing I needed in here which was not supported out of the box with Fyne, was a routing system, which I was shocked to find so easy to create myself using their binding apis and a bit of creativity.

In this project basically the app creates a context to pass around the views, and maps the string representation of the route to a view which it is "mounted" in the main window content:

        views: map[c.AppRoute]func() *fyne.Container{
            c.Setup:     func() *fyne.Container { return ui.GetSetupView(&ctx) },
            c.Login:     func() *fyne.Container { return ui.GetLoginView(&ctx) },
            c.List:      func() *fyne.Container { return ui.GetPasswordListView(&ctx) },
            c.Details:   func() *fyne.Container { return ui.GetPasswordDetailsView(&ctx) },
            c.AddUpdate: func() *fyne.Container { return ui.GetPasswordAddUpdateView(&ctx) },
            c.About:     func() *fyne.Container { return ui.GetAboutView(&ctx) },
        },
    }

// Getting the view given a route
func (a *App) getView() *fyne.Container {
    key := a.ctx.CurrentRoute()

    if content, ok := a.views[key]; ok {
        return content()
    }

    return a.views[c.Login]()
}

// reacting to the view change
a.ctx.OnRouteChange(func() {
        val := a.ctx.CurrentRoute()
        a.log(fmt.Sprintf("route state changed %s", val))
        if val == c.Quit {
            a.application.Quit()
        }

        a.setView()
    })


// changing a route from any view then looks like this
    aboutPageBtn := widget.NewButtonWithIcon("", theme.InfoIcon(), func() {
        ctx.NavigateTo(c.About)
    })

I was really proud of that, I even did a small change so I could pass a parameter around, for routes with ids for example.

I know it feels a bit web applike but every other ui framework has routing systems, that is just the way the UX world goes I guess.

I also managed, as mentioned before, to setup a whole set of github actions to build the app binary for Win, Linux and Mac, and it took me literally 2 hours without almost no trial and error that usually you end up doing when you work with CI/CD tools.

The app looks like this on linux after you install it:



Everything just worked and I felt productive like I probably never have on Desktop GUI app development.

What is next? Maybe I will finally finish one of the projects I tried to do many times before, a Football Manager clone focused on the Players Transfer Market.

Let's see if this mojo streak lasts.

And what about you? Have you tried fyne? GO AND DO IT NOW!