We're thrilled to announce the release of Storyboard 9.0. This release introduces powerful enhancements and refined features that not only elevate performance and reliability but also take your product’s user experience to the next level. Storyboard 9.0 is shaped by countless hours of development, rigorous testing, and invaluable feedback from our amazing developer community.
Stay with us as we walk you through the standout features and enhancements in this release.
To get an in-depth look at all the features, watch this on-demand webinar:
Modern embedded GUI development goes beyond creating visually appealing HMIs - it demands flexible design capabilities and scalable architecture to meet evolving product requirements efficiently.
Storyboard 9.0 eases your embedded GUI development process by providing you with new levels of design freedom, UI application efficiency, and development scalability. With Storyboard, you can create sophisticated, maintainable, and visually rich applications, and the best part of all this comes along with reduced development complexity.
In earlier versions of Storyboard, control nesting was limited, which made it difficult to build complex layouts. For example, applying a shadow effect to a specific control required placing all elements on the same level. Storyboard 9.0 eliminates this constraint, allowing developers to apply style and behaviors at a granular level (single control), thus helping in the creation of more flexible, maintainable designs without following rigid nesting rules.
This enhancement reduces layout complexity and reworks during design updates or late-stage changes. Ultimately saving valuable development time, improving UX through more intuitive layouts, and streamlining handovers. It also helps stakeholders and developers align early on structure, ensuring usability issues are addressed before finalizing the interface.
In Storyboard 9.0, layers now support scalable content rendering through a unified layout architecture, enabling design-once, deploy-anywhere workflows.
This enhancement allows developers to create responsive user interfaces that adapt to different screen sizes and resolutions with minimal effort.
By leveraging relative sizing, proportional scaling, and anchor-based positioning, the layout dynamically adjusts to different form factors. This all happens while maintaining visual consistency and usability - eliminating the need for duplicating UI components or manually reconfiguring layouts for specific hardware profiles.
As a result, development teams can significantly reduce time spent on device-specific customization, streamline maintenance, and ensure a consistent user experience across different platforms.
Modern interfaces demand smooth performance, minimal overhead, and maximum responsiveness. The latest Lua enhancements in Storyboard 9.0 make building dynamic UIs faster, lighter, and far more flexible.
With features like direct action triggering, variable listeners, and lightweight attribute updates, developers can eliminate bulky event queues and reduce unnecessary variable overhead. This means your UI logic can run leaner, with fewer background processes consuming valuable system resources, which is critical for achieving high performance even on low-power devices.
This release also introduces improved support for assigning Lua callbacks directly to specific variables. Instead of constantly polling for changes, the UI now automatically reacts in real time whenever a value updates. This means displays update immediately with live sensor data, have state transition occur seamlessly, and receive immediate responses, keeping the UI in sync with the system and user actions.
The result is a faster workflow, a smoother user experience, and more efficient applications. Thanks to Lua’s lightweight event handling, developers can focus on creating highly interactive, data-driven interfaces while leaving performance concerns behind.
Designers want a tool that provides them creative freedom, and developers need production-ready assets/designs that don't slow down performance.
While designers seek creative freedom and developers require assets that are ready for production without compromising performance, Storyboard 9.0 bridges this gap with enhanced Figma Import/re-import capabilities.
Manual imports, mismatched visuals, and tedious coding -this is what it takes to recreate the designer’s vision. Storyboard 9.0 changes this narrative.
With latest Figma enhancements, your designs come to life—bright, lightweight, and ready to be run.
How exactly?
Optimized Graphics: Stroke layers are now rendered as efficient fill extensions, not bulky image files. This keeps your HMI apps fast and responsive. Additionally, details like textured strokes and matching fills are preserved exactly as designed in Figma; this means that your Figma designs can be imported directly.
This is quite helpful for Developers as no more manual reworks are required. Interactive Figma frames can be imported directly as functional screens with built-in transitions, hence developers don't need to recreate flows in code. This Figma enhancement will also lead to faster debugging & Iteration - Since the design and behavior are preserved, there's less back-and-forth with designers and fewer surprises during implementation.
Storyboard 9.0 also comes with a whole new suite of widget-style, ready-to-deploy components, making it easier to assemble user interfaces quickly and easily.
The adaptable, reusable components in the library can be easily customized and extended without rewriting code, allowing developers to adjust layouts and styles to meet evolving design needs. Updates made to a single component automatically propagate across all instances of it within the UI, reducing rework, minimizing maintenance, and accelerating development.
The following is a list of ready-to-deploy components that developers will find within Storyboard 9.0:
With the new testing feature introduced in Storyboard 9.0, you get improved accuracy of UI test by ensuring that test execution waits for screen transitions to complete before continuing.
What is it exactly? In our latest release, a new Validator test action that pauses execution until a specific screen is rendered or navigated to has been introduced.
This gives reliable automated testing by syncing actions with actual screen transitions—no more race conditions or flaky results.
Now a developer testing a multi-screen workflow can use the new Validator action to pause test execution until a specific screen is fully rendered, ensuring accurate timing and more reliable results.
Apart from the above-mentioned enhancements, Storyboard 9.0 also comes with Bidirectional Text Support which further allows developers to seamlessly incorporate both right-to-left, and left-to-right text into UIs helping to deliver culturally relevant, and high-quality user interfaces for global markets in less development time.
With all these enhancements Storyboard 9.0 redefines GUI development for your embedded products as it comes with new levels of design freedom, UI application efficiency, and development scalability.
The enhancements introduced in Storyboard 9.0 are not just beneficial for developers, but they also empower executives and managers to visualize how to minimize costly iterations and maintain a consistently exceptional user experience. By streamlining decision-making and reducing rework, Storyboard 9.0 helps safeguard both revenue and customer satisfaction.