Embedded Device User Interfaces Tailored to Meet Specific Device Characteristics

                                                                                         

One of the most important criteria that decides the success or failure of an embedded device is its user interface or display. Therefore it becomes very essential that every embedded device has a user friendly and appealing interface. The graphical user interface (GUI) of each and every embedded device should be tailored to specific device characteristics, for example:

1. Touchscreens should use large buttons to accommodate the width of fingers and inaccurate measurements.
2. Softkeys require 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 by geographic space.

The framework, named "EmPresent", allows embedded software developers to create graphical user interfaces for embedded systems with very little effort. EmPresent supports development with the latest Rapid Application Development (RAD) tools that enable easy and efficient integration. The ability to reuse code speeds up the development and also reduces cost and time-to-market.

EmPresent is a highly portable framework, which is designed specifically for embedded domain. It provides an advanced graphical framework that is independent of the underlying platform. This allows an embedded developer to fully utilize various operating systems and various hardware devices, at the same time maintaining the same look-and-feel across different platforms.

EmPresent provides the ability to modify any given user interface without changing the underlying code base. Developers can easily modify or create original customized user interfaces for any given device. EmPresent will enable embedded engineers to use state-of-the-art user interface design tools with a state-of-the-art framework for embedded user interface development.

EmPresent provides the end user with UI Framework which contains a set of controls and utilities written in C and C++, for developing richly interactive embedded applications. All components in the UI Framework are available on different processors, RTOS and compilers. EmPresent is also planning to provide 3D graphics support via OpenGL GUI library and it’s built in GLUT emulation in EmPresent. EmPresent is counted among the leading QT GUI toolkits for embedded platform.

About the author:
Mike Nicholson
UI Framework, OpenGL GUI, QT GUI

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