Mentor Graphics Communities : Discussion List - General Topics

Inflexion Error

community_admin@mentor.com — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 07:27:29 GMT

Hi,

on one maschine we are repeatedly experiencing an issue, when the preview does not show anything, it's just black (in any situation). It opens well in the very first place, but as soon as we do one preview refresh it's turning black and after a bit more of working (without preview) Inflexion crashes and we get the error message attached.

We have not found anything in the theme itself, it's also showing up well on another PC. Any hint where we can look for the cause?

Best,

Mirko

How to optimize Inflexion application and theme for performance and memory consumption?

community_admin@mentor.com — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 07:04:02 GMT

The performance and memory consumption of Inflexion application is directly depend on the UI resources, the layout and animation structure used to develop the UI. User can take care of the following principles while designing the UIs.

1. While exporting the theme, Use Inflexion format for the graphic resources. All the graphics will be saved in Inflexion specific ndi binary format which helps is reducing the loading time of the template.

2. While using fully opaque graphics in the UI design, make the graphics in small size (may be 2x2) and use the extent property to stretch it in Inflexion. This will help in reducing the memory consumption of the UI.

3. Use the colour placement property to avoid having to use additional graphical resources that only vary in colour.

4. Adding touch down feedback to a button makes it feel much more responsive. This can be done with a displacement and will instantly jump to the new position. It is advisable to use displacement for such use cases as they are faster than the layout switch.

5. On a touch screen, tapping is often difficult. This does not mean that every graphic element needs to be huge, but tapping touch regions can be used to increase the tappable area for a button. Use the tap property for elements in Inflexion to increase the size of the tap area that you have touched down on.

6. Enable benchmarking configurations to get the frame rate and heap usage of your Inflexion application. This helps you to pin point the screens that take considerable resources. The user guide has a chapter on the bench marking configuration.

7. For panels or boxes that have a large area of uniform color, but need a detailed visual edge use Margins. Margins allow you to define a region around the edge of a graphic that will not be stretched by the extent.

8. The processing cost increases if the elements are set to render at 'high' quality while moving/animating, due to anti-aliasing. User can turn this off in the element properties.

9. Use Multi-page feature if you want to show one component across multiple screens. A good example of this is a notification/status bar which is required to be seen in all pages of the UI, but you don’t want to define an instance of it on every page.

10. In the module code make sure that you do not perform heavy processing in the IFXM_... functions. These functions are called from the UI task and performing heavy processing will make the UI less responsive.

-Awais

Some general tips on increasing performance for themes having 3D objects.

community_admin@mentor.com — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 15:16:18 GMT

Below are some general guidelines that help in increasing performance.

Reduce polygon if possible without degrading visual appearance of 3D object

Only use the required stuff inside the vertex and fragment shaders as part of custom effects

Keep the fragment size as small as possible for maximum performance gains

Use reduced texture size where ever possible; large size textures have higher memory bandwidth requirements; runtime texture fetching overhead

Use POT (power-of-two) textures if possible for better performance; reduces cache misses and ensure better texture twiddling in texture memories at the GPU

Ramp up time for creating product quality UIs with Inflexion

community_admin@mentor.com — Sat, 27 Oct 2012 08:46:58 GMT

Hi,

I have been going through the documentation, completed sample exercises and have ran the demos. However, I just cant seem to get a real hang of the Inflexion tool.

It just seems a really complex tool to use for development.

I want to get an estimate from you guys as to how difficult it is to get complete hold of the development process - including the UI express and then developing with the Runtime.

Also, please share your experiences if you have successfully used the inflexion tool to create some great UIs in actual products - as to how much time does it take and what is the best way to ramp up.

I am evaluating this tool for use in our product line and need to know whether its really worth to invest so much time in this.

Thanks.

Feature Request

community_admin@mentor.com — Thu, 23 Aug 2012 15:40:49 GMT

Hi, it would be nice to be able to add graphical effects to fonts like:

- glow

- gradient

- shadow

Copy-Paste of Displacements does not work

community_admin@mentor.com — Fri, 08 Jun 2012 10:15:25 GMT

Hi,

can you please implement a system-wide consistent way how to copy/paste stuff?

It's very annoying that sometimes it is NOT possible to copy/paste things at all (like displacements), other stuff can only be copied with the right mouse button (like conditions, otherwise you get the fieldname copied as well), others can be copied with the keyboard (like elements in the layout) ... this is really confusing, time consuming and - as said - annoying.

Frankly speaking, I expect a proper copy-paste functionality in a 2012 software as a matter of course...

Mirko

Building Android Inflexion UI v2.4 and earlier applications with NDK v7b and above

community_admin@mentor.com — Tue, 08 May 2012 10:38:37 GMT

The NDK build scripts used in the Inflexion UI for Android applications based on Inflexion UI v2.4 and earlier do not work under Android NDK r7b and later, as they rely on a build process ("make APP=<project name>") that was superceded by the 'ndk-build' process originally introduced in NDK r4.

For example, building the Inflexion UI v2.4 ifxhome demonstration application in NDK r8 gives the error:

[exec] Android NDK: Building for application 'ifxhome'

[exec] Compile arm : InflexionUIClientHome <= ifxui_home.c

[exec] /bin/sh: ./out/apps/ifxhome/armeabi/objs/InflexionUIClientHome/native/integration/ifxui_home.o.d: No such file or directory

[exec] make: *** [out/apps/ifxhome/armeabi/objs/InflexionUIClientHome/native/integration/ifxui_home.o] Error 127

[exec] make: *** Deleting file `out/apps/ifxhome/armeabi/objs/InflexionUIClientHome/native/integration/ifxui_home.o'

To update v2.4 and older Inflexion UI for Android projects, please follow these steps:

1. Edit the file ‘<NDK path>\apps\<project name>\makeNDK.xml

2. For the ‘makeNDK’ target, change the line:

3. For the ‘clean’ target, change the line:

4. Save the makeNDK.xml file

5. Build the project

The project should now build without error.

Frequent "Failed to compile vertex shader" error in UI Express

community_admin@mentor.com — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 02:38:04 GMT

Hi all,

I've had this problem since I installed the Inflexion UI Express.

This does not happen all times. It's very unpredictable.

Failed to compile vertex shader (1): Vertex shader failed to compile with the following errors:

When I got this error, the previewer cannot display UIs.

This error sometime could be gone by restarting UI Express or rebooting the PC.

I'm using ATI Radeon 4800 graphic card. Can it be the graphic card's problem?

Thanks in advance,

Yong

Different color dithering performance across versions?

community_admin@mentor.com — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 17:01:37 GMT

Hi all,

I'm using Freescale i.MX53 QSB with Android for evaluating Inflexion UI.

In the first place, I used the prebuilt image of Android provided by Adeneo whose version is 4.2.

The prebuilt version also includes Inflexion Runtime engine. However, I could not confirm the version of the engine.

Also I'm using RGB666 color depth for lvds LCD.

First I loaded my UI which has intensive gray to black gradation.

Also I took a screenshot of my UI in PC and stored it in i.MX53 QSB to compare the image quality.

Even though the screenshot showed rough gradation in Android's default image viewer due to the low color depth,

Inflexion Runtime Engine could nicely dither colors and shows smooth gradation on the LCD screen.

After that, I reburned the Android image without prebuilt Inflexion Engine.

Instead, I installed the ver 2.4 Runtime engine following the instruction.

However, unfortunately, Inflexion enine does not dither colors at this time.

It displays the image as same as default image viewer.

The image quality of two setups are noticablely different. Is there any option in 'InflexionUIRuntime' for color dithering?

Any help will be appreciated.

Best Regards,

Yong

Floating Point Error when using a mouse with Inflexion® UI on Linux

community_admin@mentor.com — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 21:46:28 GMT

When using a USB mouse with the Freescale i.MX53 Quickstart Board (using the 11.05 BSP firmware) you will see a 'floating point error' when the mouse is moved, and the Inflexion® application will terminate.

The same issue may occur on other hardware platforms with either the Freescale i.MX or 'Standard' Inflexion® UI releases, depending on how the mouse driver responds to the EVIOCGBIT ioctrl query - in particular if the mouse driver sets both the EV_REL and the EV_ABS bits, then the issue will occur.

To prevent this issue, you will need to edit the Linux framework file, located here (assuming that the default install options were used):

Inflexion® UI for Select i.MX Processors release:

C:\mgc\embedded_2011_03_iMX\InflexionUI-Runtime-2.3\Linux\inflexionui\framework\src\framework_linux_generic.c

Inflexion® UI Standard release:

C:\mgc\embedded_2011_03\InflexionUI-Runtime-2.3\Linux\inflexionui\framework\src\framework_linux_generic.c

In the function PL_Add_Input_Device, you will see the following code:

if (test_bit(EV_ABS, evtype)) dev->type = EV_ABS;

else if (test_bit(EV_KEY, evtype)) dev->type = EV_KEY;

else if (test_bit(EV_REL, evtype)) dev->type = EV_REL;

which will record the detected device as 'EV_ABS' if the mouse has both the 'EV_ABS' and 'EV_REL' bits set. Please change this to match:

if (test_bit(EV_KEY, evtype)) dev->type = EV_KEY;

if (test_bit(EV_ABS, evtype)) dev->type = EV_ABS;

if (test_bit(EV_REL, evtype)) dev->type = EV_REL;

and rebuild your application. The mouse will now work as expected, and no floating point error will be seen.

Does Inflexion UI use the bilinear filtering method to smooth textures for scaling operations?

community_admin@mentor.com — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 16:06:32 GMT

In Inflexion UI v2.3 and earlier bilinear filtering is used for textures that are ‘stationary’ (i.e. not animating), or have been set as ‘high quality’. Otherwise a ‘nearest’ algorithm was used for performance purposes. After reviewing the balance between the cost of maintaining the state information to allow switching between the bilinear and nearest algorithms and the cost of always using bilinear filtering, the Inflexion UI product will be moving to always using bilinear filtering for OGL rendering modes in the future.

How to setup the Android SDK environment for Inflexion on Linux

community_admin@mentor.com — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 15:17:43 GMT

The following instructions come courtesy of James Deutch, Sr. Field Application Engineer:

1) If you’re running 64-bit Linux, you’ll want to install the 32-bit libraries. Under Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, the command to install them is:

a. $ sudo apt-get install ia32-libs

2) You need to download and use Eclipse 3.6 (Helios). Ubuntu’s preferred older version (v3.5) in their download center does not work for Inflexion/Android development.

3) Make sure you append the paths to the Android SDK’s “…/tools” and “…/platform-tools” directories to your path.

4) You’ll need to install the Inflexion onto a Windows host so you can and manually TAR the following directories:

a. …\mgc\embedded_2011_03_iMX\InflexionUI-Runtime-2.3\Android\ifxhome\

b. …\mgc\embedded_2011_03_iMX\InflexionUI-Runtime-2.3\Android\ifxphotopicker\

c. …\mgc\embedded_2011_03_iMX\InflexionUI-Runtime-2.3\Android\inflexionui\

These directories (at least the “inflexionui” directory) will need to be placed in the NDK’s “…/apps” folder for the Inflexion plug-in to work.

Updating the Inflexion UI Android Project Plugin to work with ADT 10.0.0 and beyond - Freescale Customers

community_admin@mentor.com — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 00:04:15 GMT

you are trying to install the Inflexion UI for Android Project Creator plugin from a '.zip' archive with your installation of Inflexion UI for i.MX5x Processors Runtime, and are encountering an error because it is not compatible with ADT 10.0.0 or later, OR
you have successfully installed the Inflexion UI for Android Project Creator plugin from a '.zip' archive with your installation of Inflexion UI for i.MX5x Processors Runtime, and now wish to update to ADT 10.0.0 or later without uninstalling the Inflexion UI for Android Project Creator first

please follow one of the following sets of instructions.

If you have been unable to install the plugin

1. In Eclipse, select Help > Install New Software… The Install dialog box is displayed.

2. Click Add… The Add Repository dialog box is displayed.

3. In the Name field, type “Inflexion UI Project” (without the quotes).

4. In the Location field, type “http://s3.mentor.com/inflexionplugin/freescale_2.2”.

5. Click OK. This returns you to the Install dialog box, where the Inflexion UI Plugin is now listed in the main frame.

6. Select 'Inflexion UI for Android Project Creator'.

7. If present, ensure that the following three options are NOT selected:

• Show only the latest versions of available software

• Contact all update sites during install to find required software

• Hide items that are already installed

8. Click Next; the Install Details dialog box is displayed.

9. Click Next again; the Review Licenses page is displayed. Read and accept the license before clicking Finish.

10. When the Security Warning dialog box appears, click OK. The Software Updates dialog box is launched, recommending that you restart Eclipse. Click Restart Now to restart the Eclipse IDE.

11. When Eclipse restarts, select Window > Reset perspective. This opens a confirmation dialog box; click OK to confirm.

12. Select Window > Preferences > Inflexion UI. Set the following platform-specific parameters:

• If running on Windows:

o In the Root of NDK that contains Inflexion UI field, type the path to the Android NDK installation directory.

o In the Cygwin install location field, type the path to the Cygwin installation directory.

• If running on Linux:

o In the Root of NDK that contains Inflexion UI field, type the path to the Android NDK installation directory.

13. Click OK. The Inflexion UI Plugin For Android is now installed.

If you have installed the plugin, and now wish to update to ADT 10.0.0 or later

1. In Eclipse, select Windows > Preferences. The Preferences dialog box is displayed.

2. Open the 'Install / Update' option, then select 'Available Software Sites'. The list of software update sites is presented, including the Inflexion UI Project site added when the plugin was first installed.

3. Select the 'Inflexion UI Project' entry, then 'Edit'. The Edit Site dialog box is displated

4. Change the Location field to “http://s3.mentor.com/inflexionplugin/freescale_2.2”.

5. Click OK to dismiss the Edit Site dialog, then OK again to dismiss the Preferences dialog.

6. Select Help > Check for Updates. All updates including any updates to ADT, plus the update to the Inflexion Developer Tools will be presented in the Available Updates dialog

7. Select 'Inflexion UI for Android Project Creator'.

8. If present, ensure that the following three options are NOT selected:

• Show only the latest versions of available software

• Contact all update sites during install to find required software

• Hide items that are already installed

9. Click Next; the Install Details dialog box is displayed.

10. Click Next again; the Review Licenses page is displayed. Read and accept the license before clicking Finish.

11. When the Security Warning dialog box appears, click OK. The Software Updates dialog box is launched, recommending that you restart Eclipse. Click Restart Now to restart the Eclipse IDE.

12. When Eclipse restarts, select Window > Reset perspective. This opens a confirmation dialog box; click OK to confirm.

13. Select Window > Preferences > Inflexion UI. Check the following platform-specific parameters:

• If running on Windows:

o In the Root of NDK that contains Inflexion UI field, check the path to the Android NDK installation directory.

o In the Cygwin install location field, check the path to the Cygwin installation directory.

• If running on Linux:

o In the Root of NDK that contains Inflexion UI field, check the path to the Android NDK installation directory.

14. Click OK. The Inflexion UI Plugin For Android is now updated.

Inflexion Licensing

community_admin@mentor.com — Tue, 24 May 2011 11:16:56 GMT

Hi again,

Can inflexion be used on other i.MX5x SoM platforms or is it limited for use only with Freescale BSP's?

Thanks

Wayne

Availability of InflexionUI Express on Linux for Freescale Customers

community_admin@mentor.com — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 23:33:29 GMT

Hi,

I have recently downloaded the InflexionUI to experiment with my iMX53 Quickstart board. The software download contains installer for windows only. However some of the tutorials refer to the InflexionUI Express running on linux. Can someone help me and post how to download the linux version of InflexionUI Express? Or is the Linux version not available for freescale customers? Some clarification would be great. Thanks for the great tool!