Prism Graphics Toolkit

Create a Powerful User Experience

Prism™ enables the design of sophisticated embedded GUI by delivering rich animations, screens transitions, alpha blending, anti-aliasing, and canvas transformations -- key features demanded by today's interactive devices such as navigation systems, cell phones, gaming systems and medical electronics.

Components include Prism Insight, a screen designer and resource editor, and the Prism runtime framework, a graphical drawing engine and widget set.  Use Insight to completely design your user interface using the drag-and-drop WYSIWYG environment. Build your display now on a Windows or Linux/X11 platform with 100% portability to the final hardware target and operating system. 

Customize Your Design

Prism allows you to seamlessly incorporate a variety of fonts, images, strings and other elements into your embedded target. The widget set includes buttons, panels, scroll bars, text display and rich text editing controls, sliders, charts, graphs, animations, icons, and other graphical widget types. All of these display widgets can be fully customized, both at compile time and at runtime. Many customization are supported by simply modifying style properties for the various widget. Further customization is supported by "owner draw" style class derivation, allowing you full control over the appearance and operation of every component of your UI design.

Anti-aliased fonts and lines drawing allow you to deliver the high-quality interfaces demanded by today's users. Multi-lingual application support includes full Unicode, SJIS, and Chinese Big5 character encoding support, and string table editing and string resource file generation facilities incorporated within the Insight Resource Manager. Prism also offers advanced classes such as treeview, spreadsheet and tag control panels. It also provides integrated support for dynamic screen rotation, enabling seamless rotation of handheld devices.

Prism graphics can be overlaid on real-time video or alpha blended using multiple graphical layers. The library is easily configured for an infinite variety of display resolutions, orientations and color depths. Canvas transformations allow the next level of user experience, providing 2.5D animations and screen flows that make your interface come alive!

Take Advantage of these Features

• Supports color depths up to 32 bits per pixel (bpp)
  
• Multiple canvases with transformation and overlay blending
• Multiple hardware frame buffers with independent color depths and x, y resolutions
• Anti-aliased drawing of all graphics primitives and fonts
• Per-pixel and per canvas alpha-blending
• Bitmap rotation and scaling
• Text rotation and complete anti-aliasing of all drawing primitives
  
• Run-time resource installation and skinning
• Screen animations and transition effects
• Linear, logarithmic, and trigonometric gradient fills
• Complete multi-language support, including string table generation, XLIFF string
• Designed for embedded systems for outstanding performance even on memory-constrained systems
  

Designed for Embedded Systems

A typical full-featured GUI requires a Prism footprint of roughly 180K bytes of code (dependent on processor, compiler, and enabled feature set), 4K Bytes stack and 16K bytes dynamic memory. We also offer Prism Micro, designed for resource-constrained systems.

Prism is fully integrated with the RTXC RTOS messaging, memory management and synchronization services to provide the lowest possible overhead and a true real-time multitasking GUI environment. Prism input devices are interrupt driven, and again use RTXC RTOS services to communicate user input information to the graphical user interface. Prism can also be configured to support multiple GUI tasks. These tasks can be of differing priorities and can each directly create, display and control any number of GUI panels or child widgets.

Next Steps