• Features
• Advantages
• Runtime Modes
• Architecture
• Application

Advantages of MiniGUI

Compared with other GUI systems for embedded systems or smart IoT devices, MiniGUI has the advantages as follow:

The abundant functions and configurability of MiniGUI makes it applicable in low-end products based on the CPU main frequency 30MHz as well as high-end products. The developers can create dashy user interfaces by using the advanced control styles and the skin technology.

The feature of cross-operating-system makes it easy to run MiniGUI on the simplest embedded operating system, such as uC/OS-II, and the modern embedded operating system, such as Linux. Furthermore, MiniGUI provides complete and multi-window system for embedded Linux operating system.

These features make MiniGUI has a strong scalability, which is considered at the begin time of designing MiniGUI, so MiniGUI can not only be applied in simple devices, but also be applied on complicated electronic products.

MiniGUI is a light embedded graphical library, and we have considered the hardware situation of embedded devices and the requirement of system resources completely. The size of MiniGUI library can be reduced to about 500 KB or less, and this is very good for the embedded devices.

Besides these, the latest R&D result indicates, MiniGUI is capable of running on a system with 30 MHz CPU and 4MB RAM successfully (on uClinux), which cannot be reached by other embedded graphics systems.

The good architecture and optimized graphics interfaces of MiniGUI lead a very fast graphics output. In fact, MiniGUI was designed for real-time systems, taking into consideration the compactness, high performance, and high efficiency from the beginning. MiniGUI has been widely used in many areas, especially in industry production systems. MiniGUI plays an important role in these products or projects.

Since the release of its first version in 1999, MiniGUI has been employed by many products and projects, which, in turn, drive MiniGUI to improve its reliability and robustness constantly.

Configurability

GUI systems are expected to be configurable in order to satisfy the different requirements from the embedded systems. Like Linux kernel, MiniGUI have many compilation configuration options, though which we can designate MiniGUI libraries to include and exclude some features. In general, MiniGUI can be customized against the following aspects:

• The target operating system MiniGUI runs on.
• The target hardware platform runs on.
• The runtime mode: MiniGUI-Threads, MiniGUI-Processes, or MiniGUI-Standalone.
• GAL and IAL engines to be used.
• Font types to be supported.
• Charsets to be supported.
• Image file formats to be supported.
• Widgets to be used.
• Window/Widget appearance styles: classic, flat, or fashion style.

These configuration options increase the flexibility of MiniGUI, and you can create the most suitable system based on your requirements.

In summary, MiniGUI is an embedded graphics support system for real time embedded products with high efficiency, reliability, scalability, and configurability. It brings the modern windowing and graphics technologies into the embedded devices. We can summarize the advantages of MiniGUI as follow:

• Support for multiple embedded OSes with great portability.
• Scalable architecture, easy to extend.
• Rich functions, flexible to customize.
• Optimal balance between low footprint and high performance.
• Wide application fields.

We introduce the following new features in MiniGUI V3.2.

• The support for 64-bit architectures (MiniGUI core and all components).
• mGNCS4Touch, a MiniGUI component which provide some mGNCS-compliant widgets with animations for smart devices with a touch panel.

We modify some APIs in MiniGUI V3.2 in order to support the 64-bit architectures. Therefore, all developers of MiniGUI are recommended strongly to use MiniGUI 3.2.x for new MiniGUI apps.