Portable and Cross Platform Embedded GUI Toolkit

The graphical user interface (GUI) that lets the user control a device through the use of icons, buttons and pointers has become a key differentiator among today’s devices. Ease of use dominates the user’s preference in all aspects of a device’s design and depends on how good the user interface is? Embedded devices are quickly adopting graphical displays and user information displays enriching the user experience and easing the usage. With more embedded applications featuring full color LCD panels with a keypad or touch screen interface, the software requirements underlying these interfaces have become more and more complex.

The days of the simple text-based interface are gone. Today users want to see clear, readable fonts, animated icons, dropdown menu schemes, full color maps, and high resolution screen displays. Developing the interface can be a task in itself and managing it from within an embedded application can be frightening.

The use of ultra modern technology and high tech gadgets like PDAs, medical equipment, factory automation equipment, mobile phones have all put an extra pressure of developing user interfaces for these devices on the Embedded application developers. The biggest challenge that the application developers face is the issues concerning constantly changing platforms.

Because of the constantly changing platforms, embedded application developers feel the need to port their applications to new platforms. But porting embedded applications to new platforms in not an easy task. Because of this difficulty in porting embedded applications across platforms developers have now started to feel the need for a porting toolkit.

Empresent is a cross platform GUI toolkit which contains a rich widget set and a Windowing environment to help develop powerful GUI applications which can be ported virtually on all embedded development platforms that have a display device, and an optimum memory and processing power. Embedded application developers can use the capabilities of this portable embedded GUI toolkit to enhance their embedded applications. Empresent’s portable embedded GUI software makes your embedded environment more simple and easy to use.

Mike Nicholson