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SnapUI User Interface Development Tool

Accelerated OpenGL User Interface Development

SnapUI is a lightweight user interface development tool which streamlines the UI (user interface) prototyping and building process.

This powerful user interface development framework allows your graphic designers to edit an application’s UI independently from the core of the application itself. Therefore, designers can amend the user interface design while the developers concentrate on core application functionality; helping to reduce development time and improve project efficiency.

SnapUI is now available on Raspberry Pi, Linux, MAC, QNX, Windows and Windows CE. This release of our popular UI tool has been built from the ground up in response to numerous requests from Linux developers. The SnapUI User Interface Development Framework for Linux offers benefits including rapid prototyping on Linux embedded systems running Open GL hardware.

Using hardware acceleration and a smaller memory footprint, it achieves faster load times and blistering performance.

XML is used as the description language, providing a flexible model for quick and easy modification of user interface objects. Items such as text, sliders, buttons, video windows and their interactions can be described quickly and simply, allowing rapid prototyping of user interfaces.

In the compiled SnapUI library, a powerful OpenGL engine renders content optimised for the Freescale iMX6 hardware acceleration blocks; achieving high frame rates with reduced power consumption compared with a software rendered solution.

 

Multiple languages are supported with the aid of language tags. A mechanism is provided for extracting all the text fields from the user interface description into a languages XML file. This can be sent off for translation, allowing multiple languages to be switched between dynamically in the user interface.

SnapUI is a framework to support your expected user interface paradigms, giving you a quick mechanism to prototype screens and navigation flow, an extensible mechanism to provide user interface features that are specific to your application, and with the performance benefits of hardware acceleration to give a stunning experience. Classic SnapUI has an extremely small code footprint, unlike similar Windows-focused products which use the .net framework. This results in two benefits: not only does this mean less memory space is used in execution – it also runs significantly faster.

SnapUI defines the user interface in a configuration file (XML) rather than a programming language.

The result – a fast, lightweight and standards-based solution that improves usability and reduces development time. This in turn means that prototyping can be accelerated, and application development times shortened.

Another bonus is that graphic designers need less in-depth knowledge of the underlying application and can focus on updating the XML UI. Designers and customers can amend and edit the interface on their own without needing experts to re-compile code.

This flexibility also allows a wide range of UI styles to be displayed from a single application. For example, it’s possible – via a single XML file and a selection of images – to produce multiple designs, thereby targeting different user groups within a single product release.

SnapUI compiles and runs on:

  • Embedded Linux
  • Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 10 support
  • Windows CE (Classic version only)

 

Current UI objects include most core components such as:

  • Icons and animated GIFs
  • Sliders and scrolling containers
  • Video viewers and GStreamer intergration
  • Full formatted text support including multi language support
  • Generic SQL database output object

 

Current device control support:

  • GStreamer Audio playback and streaming support
  • GStreamer Video playback and streaming support
  • Font parsing and rendering

Watch the SnapUI Webinar

ByteSnap AI Machine Learning Gesture Recognition Demo using SnapUI & Digi ConnectCoreTM

We teamed up with Digi International for this short webinar presentation featuring SnapUI and Digi ConnectCoreTM. ByteSnap’s Graeme Wintle and Andreas Burghart from Digi International take you through the technology behind the AI / Machine Learning demo.

For engineers and developers, these powerful electronic product design elements offer flexibility, power management, light CPU footprint with blistering performance and much, much more…

 

“ByteSnap was recommended to us by one of our own firmware engineers who had worked with them on previous projects.”

“Knowing the development engineers from previous projects made them ideal candidates and helped to swiftly integrate them into the Geotech team. They also had great credentials and a proven track record in both hardware and firmware development for Windows CE applications along with some experience of intrinsically safe design.”
Steve Earp – Project Manager at Geotechnical Instruments Ltd.
Testimonials

Find out how your design project can benefit from the SnapUI User Interface Development Tool.

From start-ups to blue chips, ByteSnap’s embedded systems software developers are enabling companies to stay a step ahead by providing them with bespoke solutions. Maintain your competitive edge – contact us today and let your business be among them!

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