Embedded devices require a graphical user interface (GUI) tailored to specific device characteristics. To offer a handful of examples:
Touchscreens should use large buttons to accommodate the width of fingers and inaccurate measurements.
Softkeys require a dedicated on-screen softkey region.
A keyboard-centric device should organize data into vertical lists, whereas a mouse-centric device should organize data by geographic space.
QT GUI
There are several embedded GUI toolkits for Linux, including QT GUI toolkit for embedded platform (Qt/Embedded), FLTK and EmPresent. Before narrowing down on the toolkit one should find answers to following questions:
Which toolkit provides ease of use to the developer.
What are the controls/widgets provided by the toolkit.
How much engineering effort is needed to tweak to spec.
What footprint will this require.
OpenGL GUI
Customers have selected EmPresent over other embedded GUI toolkits because EmPresent provide ease of use, low footprint, rich set of controls/widgets and customizable layout feature. Because of persistent demand from our large customer base we are shortly going to provide 3D graphics support in EmPresent via OpenGL GUI library and it’s built in GLUT emulation.
UI Framework
EmPresent provides the end user with UI Framework (User Interface 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.
Localization of UI
EmPresent has multi lingual support and follows strict guidelines for localization of UI (User Interface). User can do the language settings statically as well as dynamically. EmPresent “consider differences in length for text string”, “use generic images and icons which are culturally neutral and that do not contain anything that must be localized”, “use text that can wrap”. EmPresent can be easily enhanced to add a new language as and when required.