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Graeme
"I fear not the man who has practiced ten thousand kicks one time, but I fear the man that has practiced one kick ten thousand times!" - Bruce Lee
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I'm developing widgets for my User Interface library. I'm starting from almost nothing because it's embedded and I've rolled my own cross platform graphics and UI libraries.
Anyway, I've developed a label, a slider, two buttons, an image control, an "svg box", and a canvas.
Controls *cannot* contain other controls. Since it is a touch screen, I'm only using one "mouse button" even though it supports gestures - I'm not dealing with those, nor should they be required.
The screens are typically small - commonly 320x240 or smaller. This means that text entry is not realistic.
What should I develop next, preferably a few in order of ease-of-implementation:usefulness in hopefully good ratios?
I was thinking a drop down list, but for reasons this is extremely complicated. I will eventually do it but meh.
Scroll bars aren't very useful by themselves as touch screens usually swipe to scroll.
A dial style control might be useful but I have to be very careful there for performance reasons.
Any ideas?
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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A list control of some kind is always a must. Just forget the dropdown part.
Checkbox, as you see fit for options.
Progress bar, if it makes sense.
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A scrollable list of some sort ... maybe swipe left/right, multi-select, etc... A scrollable list could be good for selecting numbers for time &/or date selection support...
* Groupable Radio Buttons
* Toggle Switch
* Led Indicators
Don't forget to have a disabled state for your controls.
Graeme
"I fear not the man who has practiced ten thousand kicks one time, but I fear the man that has practiced one kick ten thousand times!" - Bruce Lee
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Radio buttons and checkboxes.
Maybe some static lists, like a bullet list or numbered list.
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I agree that radio buttons and checkboxes would be most useful.
Bond
Keep all things as simple as possible, but no simpler. -said someone, somewhere
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>I’m starting from almost nothing
and
>text entry is not realistic
I have always wondered how fonts are created, the type that you can scale up and down. One way to do it is to draw letters at most high resolution, in that case the smaller letters would be scaled down versions of the large ones. What I’m describing is probably a newbie approach no one is using.
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In truetype, the text is stored as vectors, and typically very large. The vectors are then scaled down to the correct size before rasterization.
Raster fonts typically are not resized.
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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That’s interesting
modified 26-Oct-23 15:10pm.
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I don't see why "text entry" is not realistic. At the very least, I'd have a (word) search feature. If it's a canned list, then it will do incremental searching. 80x24; 320x240; 640 .. ; 1280 ... are burned into my brain.
"Before entering on an understanding, I have meditated for a long time, and have foreseen what might happen. It is not genius which reveals to me suddenly, secretly, what I have to say or to do in a circumstance unexpected by other people; it is reflection, it is meditation." - Napoleon I
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Where does the keyboard go?
One place it's not going is on a 320x240 screen.
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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There is not enough room for one of those on an IoT screen. That's why IoT widgets don't have text entry, typically relying on the user to spit bluetooth or wifi at it from a phone or PC for stuff like that.
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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The "most common" icon is 32x32. 32x24 is also manageable (24x24 being the usual).
At 320x240, that gives a potential of at least 100 keys. In other words, enough for keys, shifting, and a text box.
My PC app uses (my) "standard" 48x44 for all buttons; which scales to 43 in. or a tablet.
(And yes, my app also has a pop up keyboard; with a "split" option)
"Before entering on an understanding, I have meditated for a long time, and have foreseen what might happen. It is not genius which reveals to me suddenly, secretly, what I have to say or to do in a circumstance unexpected by other people; it is reflection, it is meditation." - Napoleon I
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You still have to have room to touch it though. A lot of these screens are like 2.5" diagonal.
I mean, it might be doable, but it would be rarely used.
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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Text output box? With up/down scrolling, if needed. Left/Right might scrolling might be interesting, but I'm not sure it would actually be useful.
Keep Calm and Carry On
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- A numeric text box for range entry. eg 1-25
underneath is a left arrow to decrement 1, a bar that if you touch enters a number proportional to the range depending on where you touch it, a right arrow to increment 1.
one touch and a few taps should allow for quick entry. - Text Entry, but using about 4 buttons for entry. No keyboard needed.
Tap a button to go up one letter, hold it down to accelerate the rotation of the current character. If you pass it up, a few taps on Down to correct it. Once you have the desired character, arrow right to enter the next character.
Arrow left deletes the last entry.
I have seen very complicated entry systems using just a few hardware buttons. Same should be achievable using software buttons.
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That's an idea, but 90% of the time it would be used like text entry on a smart TV - that is to enter an SSID and wifi password and then just ride it from there. Entering passwords that way is horrible.
To that end Texas Instruments developed a Bluetoothish protocol for shooting wifi creds at IoT devices from a phone and most connected chips support it.
From a strictly use case scenario because of all that text entry is not common, and not nearly as useful as it would be on a PC or even a phone.
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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There you go…
Text entry with an nearby bluetooth device?
Encrypted!
Is there a standard bluetooth protocol for bluetooth keyboards?
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No there's not. Not all MCUs have BT anyway. It won't be part of my UI lib. It's out of scope.
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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“Out of scope” for BT
Good answer. Keep the focus.
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What are your target applications, or is it general-purpose?
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It's a general purpose user interface library
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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One thing that I have used for my IoT projects a lot is some form of slider control, either horizontally or vertically.And usually very intuitive when using touch screens...
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That was the first interactive SVG** based widget that I built. 
My UI and graphics libs support SVG, and I've been using that to render the bits of my widgets because it looks nice.
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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