I was once working on a media player side project on a relatively low-power piece of hardware. Things were going quite well and I had hardware-assisted fullscreen video playing. I then hit a major wall: User interface. I could not find a suitable UI library for small embedded systems. And the last thing I wanted to spend my time doing was creating a new library.
At the time, I learned of one UI toolkit that was specifically designed for applications like embedded media players. Unfortunately, the developers’ concept of “embedded” was wildly divergent from my own as evidenced by its Boost library requirement.
I recently came across at least 2 UIs that rekindled my interest in this area: PicoGUI and Nano-X. However, based on screenshots, both appear intent upon replicating a normal desktop GUI environment on an embedded system. I guess I’m looking more for something that primarily organizes a bunch of fullscreen transparent/transluscent menus arranged in a conceptual tree hierarchy that can contain buttons, text labels, scrollable lists, and slider controls. These are the UI elements most useful for a media playback UI.
Any other ideas?
Hi Mike,
What don’t you try some tools[1] from Enlightenment or Qtopia[2] ?
[1] an overview : http://enlightenment.org/Enlightenment/DR17/
[2] http://www.trolltech.com/products/qtopia/index
Here is a video using Enlightenment tool in embedded device :
http://www.rasterman.com/files/eem.avi
hello mike,
here we sit side by side. when you read this, though, the where and when does not matter anymore. only who and what.
anyway, cyber talk.
nice to meet you again.
ayumi
Hi Gouchi,
Thanks for the pointers. It seems that there is no shortage of UI toolkits for embedded device. However, many of them seem to focus on traditional windows-and-icons interfaces. I am trying to figure out if any are more flexible and free form and allows for more imagination.