If you are in the Ottawa area be sure to check out the latest edition of the Ottawa Business Journal where Crank Software is listed among the fastest growing companies in Ottawa. You can also check out the online version if you are outside the Ottawa area (All the good stuff is on page 16).

Crank will have a booth this year at Design West in San Jose California March 26th – 29th 2012.

Our very own Jason Clarke, VP of Sales & Marketing, will be giving a talk on the subject of “Collaborative GUI Development” on March 29th from 3:15PM – 4:15PM in the San Carlos room. Be sure to stop by and listen to what Jason has to say.

Hope to see you all there!

The upcoming Storyboard Suite 2.0 brings with it the ability to export a Storyboard Project as a native Android Application. Here are a couple of easy steps showing you how to do that.

When your Storyboard Project is complete and you are ready to export to Android, right click on the application .gde file and select Export as Native Android Application.

Next you will be presented with the Export Selection dialogue. Here you will be able to change the application name, specify which directory you want the package to be exported to, and how your application will be orientated and scaled. You will also have the option to select how your application with be signed … either by your existing keystore or one created by Storyboard.

Next you will see the Export Manifest dialogue box. Here you can personalize your application by specifying the icons to be used with the Android application. By default Storyboard includes it’s own icons.

There you have it. After clicking Finish the Android package (.apk) will be in the directory you specified earlier on. I used the default setting and that places it in the current project directory.

The next step is to copy that apk file over to your Android phone or tablet and install.

Creating images to look impressive on embedded panels is not an easy task. The images might start out looking great on a Graphic Designer’s desktop but changes usually need to be made to either fit them on the embedded device or look best on a 16 bit display, regardless, at some point you’re probably going to run into banding.

What would have been an awesome looking image all of a sudden looks terrible. The complicated explanation of what banding is …. it’s a Limited Colour Palette With a 32 bit image you have a huge colour palette available for your image to use to transition from one colour to the next making a smooth gradient. For a 16 bit image the colour palette is limited and therefore your image doesn’t have the vast amount of colours to use to make that smooth gradient resulting in banding.

The best way to eliminate banding is by dithering. One way to dither an image is with NOISE. From Adobe Photoshop select your image then from the menu FILTER > NOISE > ADD NOISE

Then, add 1% click OK and you are done.

As you can see from the blown up banding section of the image, there is a very defined line between the colours.

By adding noise to the image you soften the hard edge between the colours eliminating the banding.

There are also two great plugins that have been specifically created for dithering an image.

Telegraphics 5_6_5 filter

Graphest’s Depth Dither

Depth Dither is only available for PC but the Telegraphics plugin is available for PC and Mac CS2/3/4.

Adding Noise or using plugins are only a couple of options to use for dithering. There are other approaches to use such as Diffusion, Pattern and Error Diffusion. I wish I could say that there is only one option that solves all banding issues but there is not. Every image is unique and how the image is dithered by adding / mixing / moving pixels around will yield unique results. Some images will appear better than others on a 16-bit display. Good luck dithering!

We have been working closely with Fujitsu to support their graphics platforms. The first one to be released is the Jade platform. This is a great ARM platform which can be accelerated using the Fujitsu VO3 library. This library allows Storyboard to be fully accelerated on the Jade platform and give high quality animation effects and great framerates on a lower end platform. Our flexible achitecture allowed us to fully accelerate the graphics pipeline on the Jade. The next step is to integrate our 3D model rendering plugin included in Storyboard 2.0.

Here is a video clip of Storyboard running on the Jade platform using the QNX operating system (excuse the odd pulse of the LCD as the timings are not quite right).

Guten Tag,

Just a quick post to let you all know that Crank Software will have a booth at this years Embedded World in Nuremberg Germany. We will be showcasing all the new and exciting features in the upcoming Storyboard 2.0 release. Our VP of Sales & Marketing, Jason Clarke, will also be presenting “Collaborative GUI Development” Thursday March 1st from 11:40 AM – Noon.

We’ll be in Hall 4 booth 4-127 so make a point of stopping by and saying “How’s it going, eh!?”

See you at the show!

-JamieV

Hello Everyone,

Hope the holiday season is not stressing all of you out and that you have completed, or close to completing, all your holiday shopping. If there is that special someone who is hard to shop for and you do not know what to get them … why not send them a link to the Crank Storyboard Suite evaluation? Storyboard Suite 1.3 Update is chalked full of enhancements and bug fixes. Areas that have been improved are PSD import no longer truncates names, templates can now include tables and multiple controls, the properties layout have been restructured, and many items under the covers have been cleaned up for better stability and performance.

I would also like to take this time and wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a prosperous New Year!

See you all in 2012.

Thanks for reading.

-JamieV

Hello Everyone,

I just wanted to let you all know that Crank now has Storyboard™ Embedded Engine for QNX 6.5 available for installation. I’ve put together a step by step to get you all up and running quickly.

If you want to run OpenGL ES 2.0 on the QNX 6.5 target platform there are a couple of steps that you need to do first. I’ve added a link to our forums that describes what those steps are.

Thanks,

-JamieV

Hello Everyone,

I just wanted to do a quick post showing the Crank Storyboard Embedded Engine running on the Freescale i.MX53 with OpenGL ES 2.0. You have probably seen the BubbleMark and GUIMark tests in our other videos but the point I wanted to make here is that I simply took those Storyboard apps and placed them on the i.MX53 with our Embedded Engine. There was no need to add any OpenGL ES 2.0 specific code to the applications or recompile for the arm platform. This is one of the great features of using Storyboard. You can reuse your Storyboard applications across multiple hardware platforms and rendering technologies without the need to rewrite the application.

This is extremely useful in the early development stages of a product. Especially when hardware has not been ironed out yet. Development efforts can start right out of the gate regardless of what platform you start with.

Here we have the Framerate Storyboard application running on the i.MX53. We are seeing between 42 – 45 frames per second.

Here we have the BubbleMark Storyboard application running on the i.MX53. The number is a little high you say … 136 ish? This is because it is not a true frames per second rate. We are showing iterations through the event loop and displaying images per second.

Last but not least we have the Raiden Storyboard application running on the i.MX53. We are seeing between 52 – 55 frames per second.

All in all, not bad numbers for just taking a couple of applications and putting them down on a new platform without fine tuning or making any modifications.

Feel like taking Storyboard Suite for a test drive? Download a full 30 day evaluation and see for yourself!

Thanks for reading.

-Jamie

Coming soon to Storyboard will be support for Android. This means users can create an application in Storyboard Designer and immediately export an Android APK that can be installed on their favorite Android device for verification and testing. This will provide our users with a quick and easy method to verify and share designs on a device before the real hardware is available. Also in the future can provide a powerful development environment for Android app developers that require NDK performance without having to write OpenGL ES code.

Here you can see a few early examples of Storyboard running on the the Android platform (Sorry for weak camera work). The first 2 applications are benchmark applications we ported from the GUIMark tests by Craftyminds. You can see from results on most Android tablets with HTML5 that Storyboard will provide a true performance advantage by leveraging the OpenGL ES acceleration. Still a couple of issues to iron out, as you can see, but wanted to give you a preview of the performance we are getting and we haven’t done any tuning yet.

Stay tuned and we’ll continue to provide updates. If you are interested in being part of the Beta when it’s ready please drop us an email.

Jason