NUI overview

This overview provides an introduction to NUI and the DALi engine.

NUI - Natural User Interface
DALi - Dynamic Animation Library

NUI is a C# toolkit on top of the DALi graphics library, which is written in C++.

NUI

NUI is a cross platform library for creating applications with rich GUI. These applications are run on a range of Tizen devices such as TV’s and wearables. NUI is built on a multi-threaded architecture enabling realistic smooth animations. In addition a range of optimisation techniques are utilised to obtain low CPU and GPU usage, further increasing graphics performance.

NUI enables developers to quickly create Rich UI applications with realistic effects and animations such as:

Image & Video galleries
Music players
Homescreens / launch pads
Advanced watch faces for wearable devices

NUI features

Provides a UI consisting of hierarchical scene graph nodes
Creates images & text
Provides Layers to aid in 2D UI layouting
Automatic background loading of resources
Easy to use Animation framework which hides the complexity of the underlying 3D Math.
Provides keyboard / touch / mouse handling

NUI Key concepts

Scene graph: Tree data structure, consisting of a collection of nodes.

Window: Top level of the scene graph, used for displaying a tree of Layers and Views.

View: Primary object for interaction. Views are effectively nodes that receive input (such as touch events), and act as a container for drawable elements and other views. Views can display content such as Color shapes, images, text etc. An NUI application uses a hierarchy of view objects to position visible content.

Layer: Layers provide a mechanism for overlaying groups of views on top of each other.