Smart and Powerful Embedded GUI Toolkit

User interface or Graphical User Interface (GUI) is a graphical interface that lets the user control a program or a device through the use of icons, buttons and pointers. User interfaces occupy an important part in all applications and software. The ease of use of a device or software depends entirely on how good the user interface is? Thus it becomes absolutely important that the application has an interactive and easy to use user interface.

The User Interface becomes much more important when it comes to embedded devices. Embedded devices are quickly adopting graphical displays and user information displays enriching the user experience and easing the usage. Set-top boxes, PDAs, medical equipment, factory automation equipment, mobile phones - you name it. These embedded applications are getting sophisticated day by day as user base widens.

The use of ultra modern technology, high tech gadgets and never ending expectations of the user 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 extreme importance of graphical user interface and the problems faced by the embedded application developers in its design and development, use of a GUI widget or GUI toolkit becomes inevitable. A GUI toolkit is a set of generic widgets for use in designing graphical user interfaces. A widget toolkit manages the creation and behavior of a graphical user interface. It is very important that the widgets that are part of a toolkit adhere to unified design specifications, and a cohesive application framework both for the application's developer and its users.

EmPresent is a smart GUI toolkit with powerful Visual Development Tools and rich set of widgets to build a powerful embedded multilingual Graphical User Interface (GUI), giving independence from platforms to embedded application developers. EmPresent is for developers who want to use the graphical editing tools and interactive design environment for embedded application development or embedded graphics development.

EmPresent is a rapid application development (RAD) tool that assists the embedded devices application developers to rapidly prototype and develop the GUI code. This component of EmPresent lets the application developer concentrate more on the application and the optimizations rather than handling the nitty-gritty of the GUI development.

Mike Nicholson