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TouchableViews
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A simple GUI system
On this
website follows a
presentation of a "do-it-yourself" GUI concept in three
levels. The first
level is
introductory and describes the main concept but does not include any
dedicated components. The second level includes components such as
buttons and text fields. This level is already sufficient for many
applications. The third level describes how to define
new components and presents some additional components.
Figure:
Example application using TouchableVIews
Why
a simple GUI system?
With the
event of
inexpensive touch screens, also non-general computers such as embedded
systems are increasingly incorporating graphical user interfaces
(GUIs). With such an interface the user can click on buttons,
input values by turning or sliding knobs and view text or graphics in
dedicated areas on the screen. This is much in contrast to the text
commands from the childhood of the computer age.
Even
though it is
fairly easy to use a GUI library once you are on a broadly spread
platform such as the PC, Mac, iPhone or Android machine you have to use
the operating systems and programming languages for which those
libraries have been developed. For embedded systems such as those found
in coffee machines, toys, student projects et cetera the idea of
filling the system with megabytes of library code just to support your
own application that might be as small as a few hundred lines of code
may feel a bit unbalanced. Not because memory is particularly expensive
but because you have to spend a lot of your development time
understanding how to use and port those libraries. If, for some reason,
the GUI part takes too much of your computing power or you would like
to make your own specific control, you are left digging into huge
amount of source code made by other people or be dependent on the
provider of the GUI system to help you with your task.
TouchableViews
is
based on a few very simple principles. Once you have grasped them you
can either implement them in your own favorite programming language,
may it be assembly code, C, C++, Pascal or any other language. Yes,
that is right, you can actually make the GUI code as part of your own
application without incorporating any libraries at all just by
following the simple principles described here!
Alternatively,
if you
are using C as your programming language you can simply include the
code that you find on this web site.
Figure: An application which shows the available
components
This site is © Copyright Robert Forchheimer
2011-2012, All Rights Reserved.
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