Crank Storyboard takes a design-centric approach to creating embedded graphical user interfaces (GUI). Users create interfaces in a desktop development environment by directly importing content from graphic design tools, such as Photoshop and Sketch, and by dragging and dropping standard image assets into a position to build up screens.

Storyboard is composed of two parts:

  • Storyboard Designer is the desktop development environment that designers and engineers use to assemble a graphical user interface (GUI) application. Once an application structure is assembled, Storyboard Designer exports the application as a sophisticated state machine application model that is used as input to the Storyboard Engine. This application model is not generated source code that needs to be compiled (i.e. C/C++) and is completely independent of the target execution environment.

  • Storyboard Engine is the target-specific executable (or library in some scenarios) that loads the model generated by Designer and starts the execution of the state machine. Storyboard Engine is a highly optimized execution environment. Each engine is configured for a specific CPU architecture (Arm, x86, MIPS, etc.), operating system (Linux, QNX, Android, FreeRTOS, etc.) and rendering technology (OpenGL, OpenVG, software framebuffer, custom, etc.).