A text-based user interface scheme for low-tier embedded systems: an object-oriented approach

Nowadays, touchable displays are widely used in most embedded systems, including mobile phones and other hand-held devices. Although interactive user interfaces are intuitively required for these systems, most of interactive graphical user interface implementations usually need lots of system resources. For low-tier embedded systems, we have presented that the text-based user interfaces are more suitable, as shown in our previous works. In this paper, we present an object-oriented approach to provide a full-scale text-based user interface scheme, especially on the low-tier embedded systems. Our application user interface implementation is very simple and intuitive, with few amount of computing resource. It naturally supports multiple overlapping windows, pop-up menus, pull-down menus, dialog boxes, and other user interface components, with graceful object-oriented application programming interfaces. We also provide large size text output for emphasis purposes. All the systems are now available as a software library, and can be used for wide range of applications.