Electronics leader rolls out consistent UI across products.

The client:

Anthem’s pre-amps, amplifiers and audio/video receivers give you the most advanced devices available to easily connect, control, optimize and power all of your entertainment systems.

Backed by over 20 years of home-grown, hands-on design and innovative audio engineering experience, Anthem products provide an unprecedented level of reliability and functionality; they deliver one of the industry’s highest performance-to-value equations. This is just one reason why Anthem electronics are the choice of knowledgeable audiophiles, professional musicians and engineers the world over.

The challenge:

• Integrating multimedia capabilities into a line of audio/video receivers. Rather than being pass-through devices, the manufacturer wanted to provide a high level of interaction with consumer media devices such as iPods and USB devices, and provide that support natively within the receiver. To achieve this goal, the manufacturer needed to provide an enhanced graphical display user interface/user experience (UI/UX) that would be more than just a dial to select video and audio sources.
• Building in scalability across product lines. The UI/UX needed to be consistent across a low-end and a high-end system. Adding to the complexity, the UI on the low-end product had to match a third party’s UI.
• Leveraging investments. The manufacturer wanted to leverage the development in the low-end system, yet enable the high-end system to have a completely custom UI.

The solution:

The manufacturer required a turnkey solution for the low-end product. Few companies have the embedded development expertise to complete the integration at the level that the manufacturer required: the experience working with the multimedia system the manufacturer was using, and an embedded UI development solution that optimizes hardware performance on resource-constrained devices. The team at Crank Software has a strong background in understanding real-time embedded systems - they understand memory constraints, CPU constraints, and prioritization of tasks. Crank Software offered the manufacturer the expertise and tools required to achieve their UI project objectives.

For over 15 years, Anthem has been setting the standard for sonic excellence in every product category it offers. Anthem’s focus on providing the best in performance and value continually pushes the boundaries in audio/video receiver design.

When this international manufacturer decided to integrate multimedia capabilities in stereo audio receivers, they turned to Crank Software for their expertise in embedded user interface development solutions.

The payoff:

Leverage R&D investment - learn from the experts. Crank Software delivered the user interface for the low-end system using Crank Storyboard's embedded development solutions. The manufacturer’s development team will develop the high-end system.

Scalability and portability. Now that Crank Software has separated the business logic from the system logic, the manufacturer’s development team will be able to easily re-skin and reapply the user interface to the high-end system. Storyboard provides the foundation that will ensure portability across OSs, hardware platforms, and CPU versions without re-designing the UI.

Easy to use tooling solution. Storyboard provides a tooling solution that allows the manufacturers development team to easily edit screens to modify the user interface.

Quick and easy integration points. The system takes advantage of the fact that there are multiple ways of driving products. From a testing point of view, even if a piece of the system isn’t integrated with a command set, the development team can advance the project schedule by prototyping, developing, and testing in advance of the hardware being ready. The Storyboard plugin interface makes integration with third party multimedia systems quicker.