What happened in 2019 - An annual summary

Some impressive numbers

• We just reached 3000 stars.
• LittlevGL has almost 700 forks.
• Already 72 developers have contributed to lvgl.
• We have closed almost 400 issues and merged 300 pull requests.
• LittlevGL was among the Top trending C language repositories on GitHub several times.

News

Big companies and project started to use LittlevGL

• NXP added it to MCUXpresso SDK Builder.
• Espressif - the company behind ESP32 - added LittlevGL to  ESP IoT Solutions.
• Zephyr RTOS also added LittlevGL

New features

• New online and offline font converter with kerning and compression support.
• Bidirectional text support.
• Multi-language support to allow internationalization of your UI.
• Subpixel font rendering for smoother fonts on lower-resolution displays.
• Multi display support.
• Generic events to simplify the handling of user actions.

New platforms

• Besides C/C++ LittlevGL can be used with Micropython too.
• An Arduino library is created
• A PlatformIO library and project is created

Others

• Translated documentation The whole documentation is uploaded to Zanata and can be translated by anyone.
• New forum We have launched a Discourse Forum. Thanks to Digital Ocean for the great sponsorship.

Future plans

Company

We want to take lvgl more seriously and we understand that if companies choose software to work with they expect a stable background. Therefore a company will be created for lvgl to provide UI development service and advanced support. More info will come soon, stay tuned!

New version - v7.0

v7.0 is on its way and will bring great new features.

New drawing system with:

• Better anti-aliasing
• Better shadow drawing and more shadow options (width, offset, spread)
• Masking feature to allow clipping overflowed content corners, using built-in masks for any drawing, creating masks from maps

New style system:

• Inspired by CSS: styles can be cascaded (e.g. style_btn with basic button style + style_btn_red to make it red)
• Objects can have local styles.
• New style properties to allow more customization
• Transition animation between states (Animate properties when going from released to pressed state)
• All the objects are reworked, improved and simplified to use the new features of the styles

Object states

• Every object can have pressed, checked, focused, edited, disabled, hovered states
• Styles can be assigned to every state
• Focus will have more importance (not only with groups). The clicked object will go to focused state to indicate that it is selected.

New themes

• The themes will be replaced by a graphics designer created themes

Tests

• Add automatic build test functional test

Other new features

• Image rotation and scale
• Add dashed line support    

  Credits

• @embeddedt For the great support, development in every field and for bringing your professionalism to lvgl.
• @amirgon For creating and maintaining the Micropython binding and for the BiDi feature.
• @puzrin For the font converter and for sharing your valuable thoughts.
• @Pablo2048 For maintaining the Arduino project.
• @C47D and @jeremyjh For maintaining the ESP32 project.
• For every contributor who added features, fixed bugs or answered questions in the Forum.