To achieve the best user experience and platform performance, look for the designer-developer workflow system, supported hardware and OS targets, and ...
There are a multitude of factors that make 60 FPS an incomplete goal. It’s not just about an arbitrary number, it’s about managing CPU workloads to ac...
How do graphics, memory usage, and power consumption affect the creation of vivid and feature-rich user experiences (UX) for IoT devices? Creating the...
In today’s digital world where information is aplenty and attention spans are limited, companies are constantly looking for new ways to engage with co...
Hint: It’s not watchOS or Wear OS There’s a wearable war in our future and it won’t be the most powerful that wins. Alongside explosive growth in th...
In 1990, the FDA published a report, Device Recalls: A Study of Quality Problems, that revealed 44 percent of medical device recalls were due to desig...
When building an embedded system there are many choices you will face when deciding the correct GUI hardware and software combinations to best get you...
Smartphones changed the way we interact with technology, making smart technology commonplace in everything from Fitbits to freezers. More recently, a ...
Gesture-based UI refers to using specific physical gestures in order to operate an interface. Take your smartphone for instance. You can already inter...
Can teams working with microcontrollers (MCU) and microprocessors (MPU) from STMicroelectronics find ways to save resources and optimize workflows? Wh...
If you’re developing, testing, or optimizing embedded products today then you know that customer success starts with an amazing user experience. UX th...
Today’s IoT and industrial device markets are changing the way we build graphical user interfaces (GUI). As users demand richer and more featured-pack...
Most embedded systems companies invest heavily in software development, and spend a lot of time on optimizing their productivity. While software leade...
Crank Storyboard is purpose-built to remove barriers between developers and designers working together on embedded GUI products. While Adobe Photoshop...
The technology of the future is getting closer. Not only are we getting a peek at what’s possible during this week’s virtual CES 2021, we’re also seei...
We all know the old adage that user experience (UX) is often best when it goes unnoticed. Embedded systems UX, however, has traditionally had a somewh...
Last week marked the official launch of the Aptera Motors solar electric vehicle (sEV). Not only is the Aptera the first electric vehicle with up to a...
When choosing an embedded GUI builder for your device, there are several factors that should be considered to ensure a seamless design and development...
It’s no surprise that the view inside the medical industry is at a time of unprecedented change, with new device and data requirements reshaping funct...
When building an embedded Linux GUI application, there are a number of considerations to be taken into account when using Crank Storyboard. In this bl...
It may seem obvious that usability should be a top priority for medical devices. But, unfortunately, devices with poor graphical user interfaces (GUI)...
Are your development and design teams ready to meet the shift in consumer demand towards touchless GUIs? While there will always be a market for touch...
Thomas Fletcher, Co-Founder and lead Storyboard product guy, walks through the ins and outs of embedded GUI testing in our Embedded GUI Expert Talks w...
Working in the embedded development space as a GUI designer is definitely different than your typical GUI and UX development role. Understanding that ...
Many people are building embedded devices that increasingly incorporate some measure of artificial intelligence (AI) into their products. An area of p...
It's common for one to be confused about the difference between UI and UX design. User experience design is really about the holistic process used to ...
What the future of connected, IoT smart devices looks like for embedded systems built with NXP processors and Storyboard GUI development tools. Rapidl...
Let’s say you’re building a smart home appliance. Or a connected health vital-sign monitor. Or an IoT factory-control panel. Or a next generation car....
It’s clear that COVID-19 has people rethinking long established cultural habits, such as shaking hands and standing close to others. It is also reshap...
Ask any embedded GUI developer or designer about re-building your product’s user interface, and you’ll probably be met with groans. Creating user inte...
Thomas Fletcher, Co-Founder and lead Storyboard product guy, talks UI task prioritization in our Embedded GUI Expert Talks with Crank Software. By wat...
When it comes to attracting Crankonauts, we know that having a positive company culture has been invaluable in establishing our reputation, and our ab...
When designing an embedded system with an MCU, one of the hardest tasks for an engineering team is deciding on the type of “brains” their new electron...
If you had have asked me (pre-Covid), what a typical day of an embedded user interface (UI) developer looked like, I would have answered with somethin...
Who says that developing a compelling, user-friendly graphical user interface (GUI) for your next touchscreen device has to be complicated? At Crank S...
At Embedded World 2020, we were fortunate to cross paths with Bob O'Brien, co-Founder and President of Display Supply Chain Consultants, a small consu...
We're fans over here at Crank of the Electronic Engineering Journal (EE Journal) so we jumped at the chance to be interviewed by Amelia Dalton on her ...
Voice recognition technology continues to grow in both capacity and popularity. The original technology was rather primitive – you may remember strugg...
Understanding and accounting for the different memory requirements of your embedded graphics application is critical. Your choice of system-level memo...
Embedded systems and UI development can be complicated. Factor in social distancing and product teams being forced to continue development remotely, a...
There are fundamental differences in developing embedded UI applications for MCUs and MPUs. But as MCU performance and functionality continue to impro...
Interview #2 The Crank Software team met up with Sebastian Ullherr, Managing Partner of interfacewerk, at Embedded World 2020 to chat about the trends...
Interview #1 The Crank Software team met up with Karlheinz Blankenbach, Electronics Displays Conference chair and professor, at Embedded World 2020 to...
My thoughts are with you and your loved ones during these uncertain times, and like so many, it’s tough to hear updates about the impacts COVID-19 is ...
A rich UI prototype can be an amazing thing. It can bring an existing product back to life and give it a competitive advantage, or it can be so transf...
We're so excited to announce our latest release of Storyboard. With a focus on making UI design and development easier for our customers worldwide, w...
Thanks to Lavanya Markandachari at Crank Partner, iWave Systems, for this guest post. Crank Software and iWave Systems partnered up to support rich gr...
Thanks to our partner Satoshi Sasaki , General Manager at Crank Partner, uQuest, for this guest post. Crank Software’s UI development software now sup...
Updated on March 5, 2020. The Crank team hopped on a plane and left the cold Canadian winter behind heading to our biggest industry event of the year ...
The biggest embedded event of the year. The team at Crank is busy preparing for our biggest event of the year, Embedded World. From the latest trends...
In this webinar The considerable growth and massive investment in smart devices combined with the promise of AI and ML has opened new vistas for IOT-l...
Battery life is one of the most important features of a mobile device. When your mobile device’s time between charges is four days versus four hours, ...
Innovation and technology have radically changed the way we work and live. And we love being at the center of it. Literally. Crank Software’s HQ is lo...
If you’ve been following our blog or have downloaded our eBook around best practices for embedded UI development on microcontrollers (MCUs) to micropr...
GUI services help your product win market share, by supporting your team throughout the development lifecycle, from UX design and prototyping to devel...
If you’re using an STM32 microcontroller, you may have noticed that STMicroelectronics now bundles in free graphics software from TouchGFX as part of ...
We're excited to announce our latest release of Storyboard. As a UX and customer-focused software company, we make a point to focus on regular, smalle...
Systematically developing high-quality reusable software components and frameworks has traditionally been a tall order. Many developers successfully r...
In this webinar See how Crank’s designer-developer parallel workflow accelerates the embedded development process by up to 50% while retaining initial...
When it comes to the buying patterns of North American consumers, the market is changing. It used to be that you could make one dishwasher, one toaste...
The kitchen is becoming one of the tech scene’s fastest growing spaces. It makes sense: the kitchen is the center of the home – where we nourish ourse...
For many years, product success was based on mass marketing, mass production, and massive retailers. But the world has changed. More and more people a...
What do you call an office with a coffee addiction, an impractical kitchen timer and ice cold coffee in the morning? Chaos. Check out our 50-second vi...
If you haven’t heard the term hybrid rendering before, that’s because it’s pretty new. Broadly speaking, hybrid rendering generates graphics by using ...
You’ve heard us talking about design in the embedded realm before, and if you know anything about the team at Crank Software, you know that this is so...
NXP's i.MX 7ULP and Crank Storyboard UIs – a winning combination for 3D graphics processing on small battery-operated devices. When I went looking for...
Don't carry more than you need. It's a rule that applies to many things. I once bought my daughter one of those gigantic packages of crayons that cont...
When you run an embedded application, screens are dynamic and change in response to data and animations. However, you can't see those dynamics during ...
If you visited our website over the past month, you might have noticed that we look a bit different. Actually, we look a lot different. Like, burn the...
Ottawa, Canada - Monday, May 20, 2019 - Crank Software, an innovator in embedded user interface (UI) software and solutions, announced today the launc...
NXP and Crank Software are teaming up again for the second webinar in our 2-part series on embedded UI development for the industry's first crossover ...
Back in 2000 when LG introduced the world’s first Internet-enabled fridge, it came with an electronic pen, data memo, video messaging, and scheduler, ...
In the graphics world, much attention is always paid to the biggest and fastest Microprocessor (MPU) and Graphics Processor (GPU), but this is not alw...
Crank was honored to showcase Storyboard's capabilities for STM32 platforms in the ST booth at Embedded World in Germany. For those of you who weren't...
Crank is excited about the recent release of the STM32MP1 microprocessor. The STM32MP1 series aligns with Crank's impressive scalability which gives S...
With the abundance of innovative technologies for embedded product development on display, Embedded World is one of our favorite events of the year, a...
With the holiday season now in our rearview mirror, it's time for what many technology lovers consider the most wonderful time of the year. That's rig...
***I asked Nick Deeble, our enterprising sales manager, to pass along his thoughts and musings regarding his recent attendance at the Smart Kitchen Su...
Delivering high-quality design and development is important for any application, but it is especially critical when creating applications for speciali...
The annual Smart Kitchen Summit (SKS) is a must-attend event for those interested in the innovations within the food technology, cooking, and kitchen ...
*** This post was written in collaboration with Garry, our delightful UK Field Application Engineer. Garry visited the new Crank headquarters this wee...
Boundary Devices has an array of Single Board Computers (SBC) that leverage NXP i.MX applications processors for developing rich, high-performance emb...
Late last year, NXP announced the i.MX RT Series, a crossover processor that is optimized for low power and high performance. Built for efficiency, co...
It was inevitable. Eventually, just about every successful company has to take the leap and uproot and move its office. For a growing company like our...
Here at Crank, we update and release Storyboard on a regular cadence. We generally have a major feature release followed by a maintenance/refinement r...
Crank Software is proud to be a sponsor at NXP Connects Santa Clara, June 13-14. With a wide range of technical sessions, hands-on labs, and networkin...
Powering billions of intelligent products, Wind River VxWorks has long been a trusted real-time operating system (RTOS) for deploying embedded product...
Today's guest blog post is by one of our UI designers, Ahren. Ahren recently experienced a world of frustration trying to use a self-checkout kiosk. W...
One of the most exciting new features from the Storyboard 5.2 release is Storyboard Connector. Storyboard Connector makes it easy for teams to define ...
We were proud and honored to receive the 2017 John Deere Supplier Innovation Award at a ceremony in Bettendorf, Iowa. The award, in recognition of inn...
The following is a post from Fancy Dan, one of our creative and talented in-house designers. Dan uses Storyboard Suite on a daily basis to create awes...
The following is a post from Fancy Dan, one of our creative and talented in-house designers. Dan uses Storyboard Suite on a daily basis to create awes...
Storyboard Suite applications scale a range of MCU to MPU hardware targets. We traditionally discuss MCUs in terms of low power, low-cost real-time op...
Storyboard targets a variety of operating systems for embedded UI development across a range of microcontrollers and microprocessors. For many develop...
We are on the road again. This week we are at the Embedded Systems Conference (ESC) in Minneapolis (November 8-9) and we are excited to see the best i...
Last week at Arm TechCon, NXP announced the new i.MX RT Series, a crossover processor that's optimized for low power and high performance and features...
The following is a post from Nik, our awesomely bearded and multi-talented Field Application Engineer. Nik recently attended the Microchip MASTERs eve...
The best and most user-friendly user interfaces are those that are responsive and have great performance. One of the biggest hits to performance comes...
Want to be able to quickly and easily interact with Storyboard Suite applications on your hardware? Our pre-built and packaged demos make it easy for ...
Earlier this year we introduced Storyboard Suite 5.0, which gave UI designers more control than ever over the aesthetic and user experience of embedde...
Microchip MASTERs is just a couple of days away (August 16-19, in Phoenix, AZ), and we're busy finalizing, flashing, and packing some really cool demo...
Want to be able to quickly and easily interact with Storyboard Suite applications on your hardware? Our pre-built and packaged demos make it easy for ...
Curious to see Storyboard Suite in action on your hardware? Our pre-built and packaged demos make it easy for you to test drive different types of app...
The following is a post from Vanessa, one of our multi-talented and insanely busy in-house Storyboard application developers. Vanessa uses Storyboard ...
We are often asked the question, “what platforms do you support?” or variations on the same that include operating systems, GPUs, rendering technologi...
The big news for NXPconnects attendees last week wasn't the scorching heat wave running through San Jose, rather it was the announcements, demos, and ...
At any given moment last week, the more than 3000 attendees at TU Detroit were talking about autonomous vehicles, safety, and cybersecurity, while in ...
Less than two weeks away, NXP FTF Connects in San Jose brings together developers, thought leaders, vendors, and OEMs for two days of education and in...
TU-Automotive Detroit is only a week away (June 7-8, in Novi, MI), and we're busy finalizing, flashing, and packing some really cool demos for you to ...
The following is a post from Fancy Dan, one of our creative and talented in-house designers. Dan uses Storyboard Suite on a daily basis to create awes...
Curious to see Storyboard Suite in action on your hardware? Our pre-built and packaged demos make it easy for you to test drive different types of app...
Curious to see Storyboard Suite in action on your hardware? Our pre-built and packaged demos make it easy for you to test drive different types of app...
Today we announced the release of Storyboard Suite 5.0. We are pretty excited about it, and if you are a current Storyboard customer or are part of a ...
Join us at Embedded World 2017 in Nuremberg, Germany, March 14-16, to experience the latest and greatest in innovative embedded technology. It's alway...
Whether it's commuting to and from work, chauffeuring the kids to hockey*, or running errands, we spend countless hours driving on a daily basis. Fort...
When working with any embedded platform it's helpful to be able to quickly validate its capabilities and performance before investing the time and res...
3D elements add movement, dimension, and life to embedded applications. Aesthetics aside, they also enhance user experience and improve findability of...
In our modern connected society, screens are everywhere. In our homes, cars, workplaces, and as we navigate the 'real world', screens change how we pe...
Crank Software will be well-represented at NXP FTF Technology Forum 2016 next week in Austin, Texas, May 16-19. We will be running a hands-on lab agai...
Over the next few months we will be attending several shows to showcase the latest features and functionality in Storyboard Suite 4.2, as well as a nu...
From February 23-25 the best in innovative embedded technology will be unleashed at Embedded World 2016 in Nuremberg, Germany. This not-to-be-missed e...
CES 2016 was earlier this month and we're still reeling from trying to take in the sheer volume of innovative technology that was showcased. It's mind...
With 2015 winding down, we are busy preparing for an exciting start to 2016 with our much-anticipated Storyboard Suite 4.2 release and a number of tec...
Embedded application projects usually involve a team of people, rather than a solitary jack-of-all-trades super designer* seeing an entire project thr...
Here at Crank, we dream of a universe full of awesome application GUIs. Where students - brimming with innovative ideas and bursting with creativity -...
This past Spring Crank Software participated in a project with Freescale (and other fine Freescale partners) to deliver the ultimate connected home ex...
While we were at Freescale Technology 2015, we shared several photos of the various Storyboard Suite embedded application GUI demos. We also posted a ...
Earlier this year we announced the release of Storyboard Suite 4.0, giving embedded GUI design and development teams an easier and faster way to get t...
FTF (Freescale Technology Forum) 2015 is next week in Austin, Texas, June 22-25, and we are gearing up for another awesome show. We will be busy this ...
Home automation provides a convenient way to control home appliances and systems. Making life easier for homeowners, it also saves energy by programmi...
TU-Automotive Detroit is just around the corner, June 3-4 in Novi, Michigan, so we are getting the Storyboard Suite demos ready to hit the road. This ...
It's Demo Friday! Ok, that's probably not a thing but it is Friday and we've got a new demo for you. Today's demo further showcases the scalability of...
As we create multi-market demo applications here at Crank, we like to deploy them across multiple hardware platforms to fully test their look and feel...
GUI design is changing, both the process and the end product a customer interacts with on a device. This is in response to a changing market. Screens ...
Just a quick update from Day 1 at Embedded World 2015 - more of a photo blog today. Pictures are more fun anyway. (As the Crank writer, it pains me to...
We've been gearing up for embedded world, February 24-26, and the biggest challenge we have right now is getting the mountain of demos we've been prep...
If you were at TI Village at CES this year you might have seen the digital automotive cockpit demo featuring Storyboard Suite. If not, be sure to chec...
Application design usually means working with an abundance of graphics, and when designing applications for multiple screen sizes, designers have to k...
Lately we've been busy crankin' out demo videos to show off Storyboard Suite on a variety of MCUs/MPUs and Operating Systems. The tool to design and d...
As we wrap up an exciting 2014 here at Crank, we are also looking ahead to the new year and preparing for a little show called CES, in Las Vegas, Janu...
Communicating between a Storyboard application and external sources is straightforward and flexible. Storyboard provides a number of connectivity opti...
When we learned that Mississippi State University (MSU) was evaluating Storyboard Suite to design and develop a fully integrated center stack in the E...
Here at Crank we spend countless hours developing new features for GUI designers, making new demos and tutorials to educate users, and working with cu...
Imagine you're a designer of graphical interfaces (GUIs) for embedded devices. If you are reading this blog, you likely resemble this. Now, picture re...
In most companies, a developer's time and skill is in high demand, and when we are prototyping UIs for embedded devices we don't always want to engage...
We've been working on some demos lately to showcase the versatility in the type of applications you can build with Crank Storyboard Suite. You've prob...
Crank Software and Renesas Electronics America announced today a collaboration to deliver an enhanced experience for HMI application development on Li...
Updated on February 18, 2020 Sometimes the best way to display data in Storyboard is with tables and table variables. Tables, as well as cells within ...
Today, we are going back to basics in this Storyboard user interface (UI) tutorial. Table basics. Tables are a special control in Storyboard. While mo...
The best tool for any job is the one that allows you to work most efficiently and effectively, and when it comes to creating stunning graphics and int...
Cars driving by themselves. In-car gaming and entertainment while avoiding distraction. Voice recognition to allow us to have conversations with our c...
Crank was on the exhibition floor at Telematics Detroit 2014. The event was abuzz with conversations around design innovations, safety in infotainment...
Our Storyboard Suite 3.2 release last year was packed full of new features for the design, embedded engine and browser. Now that it has been "in the w...
While Spring is working hard to make a comeback here in Canada, Winter is still trying her best to keep us in her grips for another couple of weeks. I...
Crank recently contributed an article to RTC Magazine about how to reduce time requirements and improve the process of bringing an embedded UI to mark...
Storyboard was created to be a portable and platform agnostic solution. This allows us to give the same experience across Linux, QNX, Green Hills and...
Crank is always improving and expanding its support for platforms and operating systems. The most recent of these is support for Green Hills INTEGRITY...
Crank Software announced today that it has been named a Proven Partner in the Freescale® Semiconductor Connect partner program. Crank Software develop...
Ottawa, On. – October 2, 2013 – Crank Software, an innovator in embedded user interface (UI) solutions, announced today that Crank Software has been s...
Brian Edmond, president and co-founder of Crank Software Inc., will be at TI TECH Days Detroit, MI, September 26. Come by the exhibit hall to meet Bri...
Here at Crank Software, we are continuously updating Storyboard in order to deliver a better experience for our customers every day. In preparation fo...
Embedded UI development teams often struggle with communication barriers, lack of visibility, and siloed workflows throughout the development process....