Introduction

Advantages of MiniGUI

Compared with other embedded GUI systems, MiniGUI has the advantages as follow:

Light-Weight and Low Resources Consumption

MiniGUI take few resources itself; with embedded Linux as an example, the storage and memory sizes typical used by MiniGUI are as follow:

Linux kernel: 300KB~500KB (decided by system requirements)
File system: 500KB~2MB (decided by system requirements)
MiniGUI library: 700KB~1MB (decided by configuration options)
MiniGUI fonts, bitmaps, and other resources: 400KB~2MB (decided by applications, minimum 200KB)
Applications: 100KB~2MB (decided by system)

The total space will be about 2MB to 4MB. On some system, full-featured MiniGUI only uses 1MB static memory.

The latest R&D result indicates, MiniGUI is capable of running on a system with 30 MHz CPU and 4MB RAM, which can not be reached by MicroWindows or Qt/Embedded.

High Performance and High Reliability

The good architecture and optimized graphics interfaces of MiniGUI lead a very fast graphics output. Obviously, at the very start, MiniGUI was designed for realtime systems, taking into consideration the compactness, high performance, and high efficiency. MiniGUI has been widely used in many real cases, 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 quite a few 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 functions. In general, MiniGUI can be customized in the following aspects:

The target operating system MiniGUI runs on.
The runtime mode, MiniGUI-Threads, MiniGUI-Processes, or MiniGUI-Standalone.
Widgets to be used.
Widget styles, 3D, flat, or phone style.
GAL and IAL engines to be used.
Font types to be supported.
Charsets to be supported.
Image file formats to be supported.

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

Scalability

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

Cross Operating Systems Support

In theory, MiniGUI can run on any multi-task embedded OSes. MiniGUI can run on Linux/uClinux, eCos, uC/OS-II, VxWorks, pSOS, ThreadX, Nucleus, and even on Win32 platform at present. Whatever OS MiniGUI runs on, MiniGUI provides consistent APIs for applications.