Features & benefits

Quick Facts about easyGUI:

• Supports virtually all monochrome, grayscale and color display controllers
• Independent of microprocessor type
• Independent of kernel / OS
• Supports ANSI C compiler systems
• Multi-size proportional fonts
• Unicode fonts
• Multi-language applications
• Reduces project time and resources
• Start programming before your hardware is ready.
• Compatible with single-task and multitask environments, with or without an RTOS.
• No runtime/product licenses!
• Rapid prototyping through easySIM PC simulator
• Efficient use of embedded resources

Sounds interesting? Read on!

Use monochrome, grayscale and color displays with any controller

Because the easyGUI library is independent of the actual display type used you are not bound by display limitations when designing the user interface. The display is simply treated as a graphical canvas, where the individual pixels are addressable.

The GUI is internally always considered in full color, and then reduced to what the hardware in question permits, when easyGUI generates files.

Any display with graphical capabilities, i.e. where each pixel is individually addressable, can be used. That covers most LCD displays on the market today. Also other display technologies can be used, e.g. plasma, fluorescent, OLED, etc.

The connection method between display controller and microcontroller can be of any type, as the easyGUI display driver is simply adapted to the connection method in use. Microcontrollers with Build-in display controller can also be used.

easyGUI considers true two color displays (pixels either on or off) as monochrome, and all other types as color.

easyGUI Monochrome supports the full set of graphical capabilities in monochrome color, i.e. 1 bit/pixel.

easyGUI Color and easyGUI Unicode supports color depths from 1 bits/pixel through 2, 4, 5, 8, 12, 15, 16, 18 up to 24 bits/pixel (true color). Color modes can be grayscale, palette based, and direct RGB values.

Use all LCD sizes

easyGUI has no formal limit to display resolution. Any resolution in both width and height can be defined, including odd numbers. We have customers running 800x600 pixel displays.

Mount the display as you like

The display can be oriented in any of the four primary directions (normal, left, right, upside down) without any limitations on the user interface.

Use ready-made high quality proportional fonts

easyGUI comes with a broad range of fonts, from small 3x7 pixel matrix characters to big 18x30 pixel matrix characters, tailored for embedded use. easyGUI Unicode additionally contains several full Unicode fonts, with character sets for a large number of languages, like Simplified Chinese, Hiragana (Japan), Katakana (Japan), Kanji (Japan), Hangul (Korea), Thai, Farsi (Arab), Hebrew (Israel), Cyrillic (Russia), Polish and Greek.

All fonts can be shown as proportional, with fixed spacing, or specially formatted for numerical columns.

Furthermore underlining can be selected as well as free selection of foreground and background colors.

Text can be placed on any pixel location, and aligned as desired (left/center/right).

Paragraph text (multi-line text items) is also fully supported.

For code reduction easyGUI compresses all font data, and contains advanced functions for font character selection, especially important for large Unicode fonts with 10000's of characters.

Add or edit fonts

Fonts of different sizes and shapes can be created and managed, using the flexible built-in font editor.

Each font can contain 224 characters (ANSI 8 bit character codes, easyGUI Monochrome and easyGUI Color) or 65504 characters (Unicode 16 bit character codes, easyGUI Unicode).

All character codes used in the supplied fonts adhere to the Windows and Unicode standards, making text entry though a PC a non-issue.

Icons and fonts can be created, based on imported bitmaps.

Windows fonts (TTF and OTF) can be rasterized and converted to easyGUI format.

Unicode support

easyGUI UNICODE additionally supports Unicode (i.e. a 16-bit character encoding) that encompasses many characters used in general text interchange throughout the world.

easyGUI UNICODE enables you to use e.g. Farsi (Arabic), Hebrew, Cyrillic, Indian, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Thai & other Asian fonts on all graphics LCD displays, independent of the capabilities of the display controller.

Multi-language support

Many embedded applications requires the ability to display texts in different languages. easyGUI provides full support for multi-language texts with the built-in translation tool.

In the easyGUI PC development system a Language window allows translation work to be performed, with instant visual feedback for both reference and translated languages, to ensure rapid and efficient translation work:

If external translators are used the easyTRANSLATE stand-alone utility might come handy. easyTRANSLATE does not contain any functionality not found in easyGUI, it merely allows remote translation to take place. A translation file is exported from the easyGUI project and shipped to the translator, along with the easyTRANSLATE utility. Upon completion of the translation work the translator returns the language file, which is then imported back into the easyGUI project.

Development process

The visual aspect of your user interface is developed in the easyGUI PC development center, a standard application running under Windows, which is well suited for such visual applications. The old style of development, with coding directly in the target system, is much slower, because of the trial and error approach necessary - especially if the compiling/linking process is slow this approach can be a significant burden.

The easyGUI data and library files are compiled and linked as an integral part of your target system. But what exactly are these easyGUI files? Breaking it into a little more detail explains this:

easyGUI generates a set of data files, containing setup, fonts, GUI designs, etc., which along with the easyGUI library, supplied as plain C source, and a display driver adapted to your specific display hardware, are compiled and linked into the target system application.

The easyGUI development center (the PC application) contains all data (fonts, displays, setup, translations, etc.) in a database, with one file per embedded project. These database files all have a common format, so that later upgrading from e.g. easyGUI Monochrome to easyGUI Color is a trivial process.

easySIM PC simulator

With easySIM the output on the target system display can be simulated on the PC, as a standard Windows application. All that is needed is the easySIM add-on package, and a suitable compiler. The display output produced by easySIM is 100% the same as on the target system, as it is exactly the same library used. For many purposes this is a big advantage, be it for demo, simulation, test, or other purposes.

easySIM can be employed in many levels of complexity, ranging from simple representations of the display images, up to complete emulations of the target system, including hardware simulation, depending on the purpose of the simulation.