.NET Micro Framework presentation library does not provide standard GUI elements like buttons, textboxes, spinners etc. In addition it does not have built in widgets that are useful to embedded development like keyboards, scrollable menus and lists. Right View Presentation library comes to close this gap by providing the following widgets:
- Button
- Toggle
- Label
- Textbox
- Keyboard
- Spinner
- Tab
- Scrollbar
- Listbox
- Gridbox
But its most amazing feature is the intuitive Object Oriented architecture that provides the programmer with a scalable, flexible and efficient framework for smart user interface.
The use of Right View will greatly decrease development time and aid the developer to create pretty data forms and navigable applications in no time. It is based on the MVC pattern allowing the programmer to have a clear separation between domain and presentation objects. It is fully flexible and customizable enabling the developer to create it own views and tying them to existing controllers without warring how the input events are handled. BPL controllers provide a default implementation that will make your widgets capture and handle events from all input sources (GPIO, Touch and Gesture).
Right View Architecture
Right View is an object oriented GUI library based on a variant of the MVC pattern called Passive View (Fowler, http://martinfowler.com/eaaDev/PassiveScreen.html). User inputs are filtered by the view and become signals that are passed to the controller. For example in the case of a button both GPIO button press and stylus press events are translated into a press event and is handed to the controller. The controller inspects the signals passed. If they are events that change the state of the view like scrolling of a list or a click that causes the collapse of a combo box they inform the view to change its state. If they are signals that change the model the controller updates the model. After the model is been updated it signal all observing controllers to update their views with the new value of the model.
Right View Demonstration:
Right View offers more than one view for all widgets. The user can create text or bitmap buttons. It can also create its own buttons by implementing a simple button view interface. She does not have to wary about handling the user input or the widget’s behaviour. This is implemented for her in the controller classes. Some of the standard UI widgets are presented below:
Picture1 :Buttons with multiple views
Picture 2: Spinner and labels
Picture 3: Tabs and a Scrollable List Box
Apart from the standard UI elements Right View has controls that are specific to embedded application. A keyboard control that is fully flexible and customizable. It can be used to create simple “qwery” like keyboards or a multi tap keyboards or any keyboard that fits the developer need in no time. Below there are some keyboards created with the Right View :
Picture 4: Multi tap keyboard with Caps Support
Picture5: Hex keyboard that gives input to different textboxes
BPL has support for scrollable containers. Scrollable list box and grid box menus can be created that have customizable items. BPL has many built in item views, but also provides an interface that very easily new container items can be created.
Picture 6: Scrollable Menu
Picture 7: Scrollable list boxes