Due to differences in our business visions, from now on, the development and design of our software will be completely carried out by the SquareLine team and LVGL has no longer any influence in this.
In the last years we developed SquareLine Studio together and as a partner we also played a significant role in the current image and development of LVGL.
In the future, we would like to develop SquareLine Studio not as an LVGL editor, but as a complex, cross-platform UI solution.
We consider it essential to put emphasis on supporting LVGL in the future, we will also base our embedded technology on this platform. SquareLine will support LVGL versions and new feature adds in the future. We continue to work to support our customers with unique and special solutions in addition to the original LVGL features. Our goal is still to quickly and easily create an extremely spectacular UI with our solutions.
The SquareLine team is constantly expanding and the developments have also accelerated. The February release includes many important new features and fixes, v2 version is coming soon, on which we will share more information with you soon.
We thank everyone who has chosen and supported us on this exciting path of development. You can count on our full support in the future, we will be excited to share with you details on our next developments at SquareLine Studio.
Turn to us in case of any questions!
Regards,
SquareLine Team
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Hello,
I had heard of this via the LVGL forum, sad news indeed.
Does this mean that Squareline Studio will not only work with LVGL but other GUI-platforms as well? To be quite honest this sounds like you might be biting off more than you can chew, but perhaps I misunderstood.
I completely understand wanting to separate LVGL and Squareline, but I really hope you will keep working closely with LVGL and maintain/ improve the compatibility. That feature, and how easily it allows us to create UIs for platforms that have extensive support for lvgl, is the entire appeal for my business. There would be very little incentive to use squareline if that support isn’t there.
You have created a great product and I believe in the team, and I believe you know what you’re doing. I just wanted to voice my concerns so you have a voice from the users. Good luck, and I’m looking forward to seeing how this develops.
Correct, SquareLine Studio is on a journey to becoming a cross-platform UI solution. Our development roadmap is ambitious and exciting, and we look forward to sharing more updates soon.
We appreciate your support and thanks for voicing your concerns. SquareLine will continue the support for all versions of LVGL now, and in the future.
We are furthermore working on the development of an ambitious and exciting roadmap.
That’s great to hear! Thanks for taking the time to reply, and I’m looking forward to seeing how squareline evolves. You guys are doing excellent work.
LVGL is from the tiny amount I have seen a very good little library. Squareline studio though is pretty awful in terms of how much of that functionality can be controlled and how easily. From what i see beyond laying items out it then means a lot of work in code to get what you want. For this to work squareline needs to work even more closely with LVGL than ever before or you will be chasing fixes to the program to match changes in the library.
Hopefully this will remain high on the priority list. As of now SDS allows us to select LVGL 8.3.6 which was released on 3 April 2023. LVGL has since released 5 more version on the 8.3 branch which wasn’t added to SDS. I have not seen any documentation that we can for example, run 8.3.11 on the embedded side with exports from SDS last supporting 8.3.6.
Now LVGL has 9.0.0 which could be a bigger tear up for SDS. Maybe v2 has some good news for us in this regard.
Updates in the past have taken a long time, especially with critical bugs. It was discussed in these forums by SquareLine Team that new developers were hired with the goal being new releases every 2-3 weeks. What impact will this new business vision have on updates?
To be honest when my colleague found squareline studio and explained how recent it was i was dubious and suspicious that one day I could find myself without the software I needed to update old projects or to continue at all.
The original attractiveness of SLS was that it was focused to LVGL and had a price that small development teams could afford. With the latest price increase and now this news, I am concerned that SLS is trying to become something like Qt. If this is the case, you will lose the original advantage of SLS. There are similar tools to SLS which may have to be reconsidered.
Thank you for your comment, our concept is to reduce as much programming as possible, we are working on that the new functions in new version will constantly allow this.
We are highly concerned about the latest changes as well.
Could you please explain in more detail what “SquareLine Studio is on a journey to becoming a cross-platform UI solution” means? That sounds nice from a marketing perspective, but what frameworks will be included in future?
As of today Squareline is only supporting a subset of widgets available in LVGL. Can you tell a date when all current widgets are being supported by Squareline?
Are there also plans to generally improve the underlying architecture of the generated code, so that it is easier reusable in C++? For huge and complex applications this currently is one of the biggest challenges we are facing. It lacks a clearer separation of functionality and UI.
@mrmarteng: In SquareLine Studio v1 only LVGL will be supported.
SquareLine Studio v2 is not public yet but we can already say that we want to support exporting REACT and REACT-native code by it, and possibly include support for more embedded platforms/toolkits too.
We’ll never integrate all the LVGL widgets because we feel many of them toolkit/platform-specific and limited for some uses due to their hard-coded nature.
We choose a different approach instead, supporting the universal building-blocks that are compatible between different platforms, and build more complex extra widgets out of them in any way the designer likes.
There are plans and progress at the present to improve the layered nature of the exported UI code, separating widget-creations from text/styles-settings and behaviours and adding an extra GUI layer for easier use, as well as improving C++ compatibility and adding better techniques for code-reuse and modularization.
We are open to all your suggestions regarding the usability of the exported code in more detail, please share it with us in a nutshell, even here at this very topic, if you want.