SnapUI is a lightweight user interface (UI) customisation tool designed to simplify the Windows CE design process.

Free to ByteSnap customers, it enables your graphic designers to edit an application's UI independently from the core of the application itself. This means that the designers can amend the UI design while the developer team concentrates on core application functionality.

SnapUI has an extremely small code footprint, unlike similar Windows-focused products which use the .net framework so can carry heavy performance penalties. However, SnapUI defines the user interface in a configuration file (XML) rather than a programming language, so hardly impacts performance at all.

The result is a fast, lightweight and standards-based solution that improves usability and reduces development time. This in turn means that prototyping can be accelerated, and application development times shortened.

Another bonus is that graphic designers need less in-depth knowledge of the underlying application and can focus on updating the XML UI. The result is that designers and customers can amend and edit the interface on their own without needing experts to re-compile code.

Additionally, this flexibility enables a wide range of UI styles to be displayed from a single application. For example, it's possible via a single XML file and a selection of images to produce multiple designs, thereby targeting different user groups within a single product release.

SnapUI compiles and runs on:

• Windows CE
• Windows Mobile both Smartphone and Pocketpc
• Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7 (all 32 and 64 bit)

Current UI objects include most core components such as:

• Icons with full alpha blending support
• Sliders
• Scroll Bars
• Video viewers
• Full formatted text support
• Generic SQL database output object

Current device control support:

• Media parser for audio, video, images
• DShow Audio playback support
• DShow Video playback support
• Image playback decoding

Download our desktop PC demo:

SnapUI PC Demo V1_10

This demo includes two XML examples, the first is a media demo that was being used at the ESC'09 show in Farnborough. This demo was being shown on a Windows CE OMAP Kit from Direct Insight, the other is a simple overview of the engine itself demonstrating some of the UI components.