QNX | Case Study | Storyboard GUI Design Tool | Crank Software

Category: Case study
Vertical: Automotive
Est. read time: 3 min

QNX’s Concept Car with Crank Storyboard UI Software

The challenge:

To prototype, develop and deploy a graphically rich UI for the QNX Bentley Concept Car in under three months.

The solution:

Crank Storyboard provided the UI technology powering the beautiful center 17-inch curved 1080p display that uses Texas Instruments' DLP technology. With QNX and Crank working together, the QNX Concept Car showed off a number of capabilities:

QNX Car 2 integration

system services
multimedia engine
Storyboard IO
QNX PPS

Partner ecosystem integration

webkit (HTML 5)
navigation

Full OpenGL ES 2.0 acceleration

custom shaders
rich animations

Multi modal input

multi touch
pre touch
hard buttons / dials
voice

QNX and Crank:

Watch as QNX Software Systems and Crank Software cross the finish line in time for CES 2013.

"We had three months to deliver on our technology concept car for the Consumer Electronics Show, and choosing Crank's Storyboard Suite to develop many of our UI components proved to be an excellent decision"

Andy Gryc

Automotive Product Marketing Manager

★★★★★

Concept Car Walk Through:

Take a look at the first video walk through of the QNX Bentley. Make sure to pay close attention at the 1:15 mark when Mark Rigley from QNX gives us a nice shout out.

Rapid UI Development

Getting a product out to market on time and on budget is no easy feat. Storyboard helps in accomplishing that task by enabling a rapid UI development environment.

Graphic designers can easily import Adobe Photoshop PSD files with Storyboard. Once the PSD file is imported into Storyboard, the embedded UI engineer can quickly start applying actions and events to controls the application.

Storyboard provides a WYSIWYG environment. This gives the engineer a real time display of what the final product will look like. Adding and removing controls, layers, screens, etc. happens in real time. There is no need to make a change and then recompile to see what the UI will look like.

Storyboard includes a simulator enabling the engineer to test the application in real time. Not only does the engineer automatically see the visual changes to the application in Storyboard but they can also run the simulator to see the application function in real time. The engineer can click on buttons, enter text, etc. and get a feel for how the application will perform before exporting to the target device.

Prototyping the application is just a matter of exporting the data bundle to the target platform. There is no code to compile with Storyboard. The application is converted to a data bundle that the Storyboard interprets.