Programming Snapshot – Go and Fyne

Command-line programs in Go are all well and good, but every now and then you need a native desktop app with a GUI, for example, to display the photos you downloaded from your phone and sort out and ditch the fails. At the end of the day, only a few of the hundreds of photos on your phone will be genuinely worth keeping.

Three years ago, I looked at a graphical tool – very similar to the one discussed in this article – that let the user manually weed out bad photos [1]. It ran on the Electron framework to remote control a Chrome browser via Node.js. Recently, the Go GUI framework Fyne has set its sights on competing with Electron and dominating the world of cross-platform GUI development. In this issue, I'll take a look at how easy it is to write a photo fail killer in Go and Fyne.

Recently, ADMIN, a sister publication of Linux Magazine, featured some simple examples [2] with Fyne, but a real application requires some additional polish. Listing 1 [3] shows my first attempt at a photo app that reads a JPEG image from disk and displays it in a window along with a Quit button. The photo dates back to my latest tour of Germany in 2021, where I set out to track down Germany's best pretzel bakers between Bremen and Bad Tölz. Figure 1 shows the app shortly after being called from the command line with a fabulous pretzel from Lenggries on the southernmost edge of Germany. My only complaint about the app's presentation with the photo and the Quit button is that it takes a good two seconds to load a picture from a cellphone camera with a 4032x3024 resolution from the disk and display it in the application window. Building a tool for image sorting with sluggish handling like this wouldn't attract a huge user base.

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