Tablets, Windows 7 and the EZGUI advantage !

Interested in writing software for Tablet PC’s running Windows 7 ?

The user interface for Tablet PC software has to be designed differently than software written for a desktop PC. Because with a touch screen, the user is using their fingers rather than a mouse, so you need a totally different interface. The problem with Windows 7 is that it is geared towards mouse input, rather than a finger. Now forget even stuff like multi-touch, even simple cursor movement with ones finger can be quite tricky without a mouse.

I had one customer who was writing software to be used with a touch screen and he found the Windows TrackBar control very difficult to work with on a touch screen. So what did he do ? He created his own trackbar control using the EZGUI Canvas control and designed it so it worked better with touch than the built in trackbar control. The point is that Windows (any version) on a Tablet requires a different interface than one designed for a desktop PC.

EZGUI 5.0 Professional (requires PowerBasic compiler) has a number advantages for Tablet PC software design such as …

1. Low memory and disk space requirements.

EZGUI was designed so you can do a lot, with minimal hardware. EZGUI has a very small footprint (from 700 KB to about 950 KB) for its runtime and EZGUI EXE’s are just plain tiny.

2. Drag and Drop is built in.

EZGUI is unique in that it has a built in drag and drop engine. It has all the features built into the runtime, so one can build a Visual Designer or any WYSIWYG style application.

3. Sprite engine.

You can even use the Sprite engine for drag and drop of non-rectangular images and even have alphablending and anti-aliasing. Imagine being able to drag and drop images which act like translucent glass and without any DirectX or any other hardware support required. EZGUI’s sprite engine is a 100% proprietary software based engine which uses little memory and it works on any version of Windows from Windows 95 to Windows 7.

4. Control customization built in.

EZGUI provides a number of mechanisms for creating totally customize controls. The ownerdraw engine and customdraw engine allow you to build amazingly unique user interfaces specific to the needs of a Tablet PC. The subclassing engine allows you to gain direct access to the low level window procedures of any control class, so you can add new features to them.

5. Graphics, Graphics, Graphics.

EZGUI has an advanced graphic engine, from sprites, OpenGL 3D scripting language, vector graphics (turtle graphics scripting language) and a drawing engine which can do all sorts of advanced things. Tablet PC user interfaces are more graphic oriented, so you need good graphic support. The nice thing about EZGUI is that it does this all with a small footprint. EZGUI does things in a 700 KB DLL, that other programming environments require 20 or 30 meg frameworks to do. Its the small footprint design of EZGUI that gives it an advantage.

You don’t need any special hardware to run EZGUI applications. Even the lowliest Atom processor with 1 gig ram is plenty for EZGUI. While some development tools today produce huge applications, which require a CD or DVD to distribute the application, EZGUI applications are so small they can fit on a floppy disk, so the small size of the drive space on a Tablet PC SSD (solid state drive) is plenty of space for most EZGUI applications.

If your company needs an advantage when designing software for todays Tablet PC’s running Windows 7, then take a look at EZGUI 5.0 Professional (and the latest PowerBasic compiler).