UI Framework

We learned from the rest, then built the best

There are lot of UI frameworks out there. Some are great on the desktop, but come with a lot of baggage that limits their utility on mobile. Some are built from the ground up for mobile, but only for specific types of device.

We spent a long time looking at UI frameworks such as Apple's 'UIKIt' and Nokia's 'Qt'. We learned a lot from these. We then went away and designed our own UI framework that built on the best ideas we'd seen, and tried to replace what was missing and fix what was broken.

The result is Airplay's 'IwUI' module. Features include:

Rich widget set

Mobile UI designers want powerful widgets that work out-of-the-box. Airplay provides all of the core widgets required to build a rich mobile UI. These work great as provided, or can be sub-classed to modify or extend functionality.

Unlike Apple's UIKit, Airplay ensures that all widgets work across all device form factors. For example, the 'text entry' widget might bring up a 'soft keyboard' on a touchscreen device, but would bring up a standard keypad texting interface on a keypad-only device. The developer just creates a single widget, and lets Airplay do the rest.

Dynamic layout

Like Nokia's Qt, but unlike Apple's UIKit, Airplay provides a powerful dynamic layout system, allowing user interfaces to accommodate any screen size. Developers can provide a single design and let the layout system do its thing, or they can provide a number of designs based on key screen sizes, letting the layout system pick the best design and tweak it accordingly.

Reskinning

Airplay provides a powerful 'style sheet' system to allow UI look-and-feels to be easily modified. Designers can either use Airplay's clean-and-shiny 'house style', modify this style, or provide an entirely new style.

Drag-and-drop tool

No UI framework would be complete without a design tool. Airplay's UI Builder lets designers drag and drop widgets into a live Airplay Windows Simulator view. All aspects of the UI design, look-and-feel, and animated transitions can be created and tested within the tool. Data is exported in readable text files, for importing into the app code project.

Powerful events

Airplay's UI framework adopts a traditional model-view-controller architecture. Interactions are event-driven. Directed and broadcast events, event handlers and event filters are all supported.

Rendering and animation

Airplay's UI framework is tightly integrated with all other levels of the Airplay SDK and runtime. For example; the full power of the resource management framework is leveraged, and hardware graphics acceleration is used where available.

Many widget properties can be animated using linear interpolation of keyframe values; widgets can be scaled, translated, faded, and rotated. Animations can be created programmatically, or in the UI Builder tool.

Furthermore, any subset of the UI rendering can additionally receive a 3D transformation. This allows for the addition of 3D transitions, or even full rich 3D interfaces.

The Airplay SDK UI toolkit is currently in Beta. Please give us your feedback!