Product How-To on: Creating an embedded user interface with the Prism UI development toolkit
Prism was created to provide a complete framework and toolset for designing and deploying advanced graphical interfaces on embedded systems, providing everything need to generate professional quality graphics for display on resource-constrained embedded targets.
Prism includes a graphical drawing engine and widget set called the Prism Runtime Framework, and Prism also includes Prism Insight, a desktop application program used to quickly and easily create Prism applications.
Prism Runtime Framework incorporates a complete high-performance graphical drawing library and GUI widget set. This framework provides all of the necessary nuts and bolts to enable developers to create professional quality graphics for display on nearly any target system capable of graphical output.
Prism Runtime Framework allows incorporation of any number of fonts, images, strings and other assets seamlessly on your embedded target, with or without a file system. The widget set includes a wide variety of buttons, panels, scroll bars, text display and rich text editing controls, sliders, charts, graphs, animations, icons, and other graphical widget types.
Developers can easily add their own custom widgets to the framework. Any combination of input devices including keypad, keyboard, touch screen, mouse, and multi-touch capable input devices can be utilized within this framework.
Variations of Prism Runtime Framework are available for all color depths, screen resolutions, and hardware capabilities. Color depths ranging from monochrome to full 32-bit-per-pixel drawing with alpha channel are fully supported. Prism Runtime Framework is provided ready to run on an embedded target without requiring any underlying support.
Prism Runtime Framework is also provided in convenient desktop configurations, meaning that it is possible to build and execute a complete UI design in a Microsoft Windows or Linux/X11 environment well before the availability of your target hardware.
A simple data schema is a built-in component of the Framework. Graphical widgets can be data producers, data consumers, or both. Your system software can also easily produce or consume data to interact with the user interface.
This mechanism greatly simplifies the task of coding the functionality of your user interface, and reduces or even eliminates the man-hours required to “hook-up” your graphical widgets when using competitive toolkits.
The framework can be configured such that even when running on grayscale or low color depth displays, the software internally runs in hi color depth, thus enabling the advanced capabilities set.
The final graphical output is then down sampled to the compatible output color format. This allows sophisticated effects like alpha-blending and anti-aliasing to be accomplished even on color-depth limited target devices.
Combined, these components provide all of the necessary nuts and bolts to allow a developer to create professional quality graphics for display on nearly any target system capable of graphical output.
Prism Insight allows you to incorporate any number of fonts, images, strings and other assets seamlessly on your embedded target, with or without a file system. Insight allows you to graphically describe you UI appearance and function, and generates source code that build into your final application.
The Prism Runtime Framework widget set includes a wide variety of buttons, panels, scroll bars, text display and rich text editing controls, sliders, charts, graphs, animations, icons, and many graphical widget types. Any combination of input devices including keypad, keyboard, touch screen, mouse, and multi-touch capable input devices can be utilized with this framework.
The steps following describe how to use the various pages or modes of Prism Insight to design and deploy an embedded UI application.
Loading comments... Write a comment