Embedded GUI libs w/alpha, anti-aliasing

From: Randall Nortman (usenet8189_at_wonderclown.com)
Date: 05/07/05

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    Date: Sat, 07 May 2005 19:55:29 GMT

    I'm for libraries for developing small GUIs for small touchpanel
    screens (in the 6"-8" range, 640x480, 256 color). The primary concern
    is that the interfaces look really pretty, with anti-aliased vector
    drawing and fonts (sub-pixel rendering would be excellent), 8-bit
    alpha blending, nice gradients, dithering to compensate for having
    only 8-bit color, etc. Given that the interface will be touchscreen
    rather than mouse, the GUI lib should be able to create oversized
    buttons. Multi-window capability is neither required nor particularly
    desired -- titlebars just waste space, and multitasking is not an
    issue in this application.

    The screen will be driven by embedded hardware -- something like a
    75MHz ARM with 16MB RAM. The good news is that this CPU doesn't need
    to run anything other than the interface and a TCP/IP stack. I can
    either run the UI app itself locally, or use an X server with remote
    display of an app running on another machine on the network. The UI
    app itself can be pretty slim; by far the most resource-intensive part
    will be anti-aliasing, alpha blending, etc, so moving this off the
    embedded device onto a full-powered machine and just leaving a slim X
    server on the panel makes some sense. But for better responsiveness,
    I'd rather cram as much of it locally as possible, without slowing the
    thing down even more than the network would.

    Python is my favorite language, but if necessary I'll do it in C/C++
    to save resources. There are quite a few things out there, none of
    which I've ever used: PicoGUI, TinyX, FLTK, etc. Some libs take the X
    model of separating display server from window manager from
    application, and some combine these things together. To save myself
    weeks of learning the features and quirks of each one, I'd love to
    hear from anybody who's actually used some of these toolkits and can
    offer some advice.

    TIA,

    Randall Nortman

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