How to make a GUI for embedded systems?

I don't know of a particular book to recommend, but you need to learn your platform very well, so I'm sure you can find books about your platform for C. You need to become very familiar with your windowing environment. If linux, you'll need to be a master of GTK or QT. If Windows, you need to know the Windows API.

To make your job easier, you should look for higher level abstractions that wrap the API. OOP classes are a great way to do this, and it will be much harder if you use "straight C".

Ideally you should leverage other open source controls, such as the popular Scintilla syntax highlighting editor.

I've made 2 IDEs for Windows using Delphi and SynEdit. I've switched to C# for my newest work because I can leverage a great deal of functionality built-in to the .NET Framework.

Start simple - most people who try to solve world peace in their first IDE will fail dismally and give up. Also, work in pieces and test often. Don't code for two months before you have something you can run and test. You should not go more than 1 week without testing what you've done.

Save many versions of your work in case you need to go back. I typically make about 3 or 4 zip backups of my directory tree each day.

Eric

A good book for this is Niall Murphy's one called "Front Panel - Designining Software for Embedded User Interfaces" (ISBN 0-87930-528-2, published by R&D Books - see ). It comes with a disk and there are plenty of examples in C and C++.

Sound advice but I would go even further and say you should test at least daily and more often than that if you can (us Forthers will test things hundreds of times a day).

Again, sound advice but, even better would be to establish a decent version control system that you are comfortable with. RCS or CVS would be good and I believe there are free versions available for all flavours of OS.

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Paul E. Bennett ....................
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Subversion. That is all.

;)

Steve

Thank you all

"Steve at fivetrees" skrev i meddelandet news: snipped-for-privacy@pipex.net...

and

C

It seems to me, both by implication of the "G" in GUI and by the reponse that you have got that your needs are greater than are addressed in m article "Hierarchical Menus in Embedded Systems". My approach was tailore to the use of non-grahical displays, but you may still find somethin useful in it. It was published in Circuit Cellar, November 2003. You ca find a copy of it here http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:UL3Ag0HghiQJ:

although Circuit Cellar does charge a nominal amount for the download.

There is also some discussion on the topic here

and including the initial concept of my article.

-Aubrey