Embedded GUI Toolkit for Rich and Interactive Graphical User Interfaces

User interface decides the success and failure of an embedded device. Due to this, it becomes very important that every embedded device should have user friendly and attractive interface. The user interface of each and every device should be made keeping in mind the functionality and specifications of each device. For example:

1. Touch screens should use large buttons to allocate the width of fingers and inaccurate measurements.
2. Softkeys need a dedicated on-screen softkey region.
3. A keyboard-centric device should organize data into vertical lists, whereas a mouse-centric device should organize data into geographic space.

There are lots of GUI toolkits for Linux including QT GUI toolkit for embedded platform and FLTK. Before narrowing down on the toolkit one should get the answers of various questions which are listed below:
• Which toolkit provides ease of use to the developer?
• What all controls/widgets are provided by the toolkit?
• How much engineering effort is needed to tweak the spec?
• What is the footprint size?

EmPresent, an embedded graphical user interface toolkit, provides low footprint, is easy to use, has customizable layouts and rich set of widgets. Due to persistent demand from embedded developers EmPresent is also planning to provide 3D graphics support via OpenGL GUI library and GLUT emulation.

EmPresent provides highly portable framework designed explicitly for embedded development. It offers an advanced graphical framework that is independent of underlying platform. This permits an embedded developer to use several operating system and hardware devices while maintaining the same look and feel across distinct platforms.

EmPresent provides the end user with user interface framework which comprise of a large set of widgets/controls and utilities written in C and C++, for emerging richly interactive embedded applications. All components in the UI framework are available on different compilers, processors and RTOS. It has multi lingual support and follows strict strategies for localization of UI. User can easily do settings of language dynamically as well as statically. EmPresent “uses generic images and icons which are culturally neutral and that do not contain anything that must be localized”, “consider difference in length of text string”, “use text that can wrap”. It can be easily modified to add a new language as and when needed.

Mike Nicholson