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Preface

As coming of Internet of Things, the “screen reading” era predicted by Kevin Kelly has also arrived. Besides products like mobile phones and tablets which are PC-liked devices, there’re more and more embedded devices will be equipped with touch display. Building a good UI application on embedded devices with limited resources is not an easy task. The whole traditional process is really time and energy consuming.
LVGL is a mature, popular and well designed open-source UI library with for embedded devices with limited resources. More and more people are using it. However, starting from scratch to create an LVGL application manually still requires a lot of work. As a result, some design tools for LVGL are emerging. Users design their own UI thru drag and drop widgets, then compilable and runnable C language code can be generated. Also, user can launch an emulator to preview how it’d look like in a device. This is really increasing the efficiency, saving a lot of time and energy.
Here, I’m gonna introduce an UI design artifact based on LVGL - Anyui. It is free, cross-platform, no registration is required, and can even support the web version. Really worth giving it a shot.

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一、What is Anyui？

Anyui is a desktop based UI designer for embedded device, currently support LVGL, which is a lightweight popular UI framework for limited resource devices. You can build your own UI simply by drag and drop widgets to a canvas (a screen), change their attributes and styles, then Anyui will generate compilable and runnable source code (C code) for you in one key. You can also run a simulator to preview what it’d look like in a device. In this way, you skip the tedious steps of traditional way to write a lot of C language code, build the project, flash it into device, and finally you’re able to verify if everything works right. Just focus on your design and let Anyui takes care of the rest. Meanwhile, Anyui provides similar use experience as Sketch which is a very prevailing design tools. All the efforts of Anyui is aiming to increase efficiency of your work.
Currently, Anyui supports Windows, Mac and also have a web based playground, you can try it online without downloading any package. Plus, it’s free. And no need for any registration. Simply download and install it, and you’re good to go.

Anyui supports:

• Windows, Mac and Web
• Multi-languages (Chinese and English)
• Rich builtin widgets
• Custom widgets
• Undo/Redo (history operation)
• Quick duplication
• Auto alignment
• Canvas scale
• Widget lock/hide
• Portrait/Landscape mode
• New version check
• Flexible user custom UI layout
• and so on …

二、Features of v0.16.0 release

You can download it here.

• Add new resolution support: 480 x 320

You can select resolution 480 x 320 when creating new project.

• Support draggable widget bar

When you move mouse over widget bar, a little handler will appear on widget bar. Drag the handler you can move widget bar as you want, and the position will be remembered, so next time you open anyui, the widget bar will be where it was when last closed.

• Improve setting dialog, and add config for direction of widget bar

In system setting, you can choose direction of widget bar to be Horizontal or Vertical.

• Improve event editor

• Improve Slider & DropdownList & Bar widgets
• Improve context menu position
• Add Rename to Menu
• Add back Save as custom to Menu
• Fix “value of pos/size of widget could be doulbe type” issue
• Other improvements

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Sum up

Anyui is rapidly iterated and more and more features will be added. This chapter introduce the new features introduced in v0.16.0 which is latest released.