A lot of exciting things have happened in the past couple of months around LVGL. We have released v7, renamed LittlevGL to LVGL, established a company for the library, created a new website, and started services. You might have already noticed some of them — for example, the forum is already running at https://forum.lvgl.io. I'm very excited to announce all the news and tell you about them in more detail.
Table of Contents#
- LittlevGL is now LVGL
- New Website
- Establishing LVGL LLC
- Services
- Roadmap
- Contributors License Agreement
- v7 is Released
- New Release Policy
- Join the Development
LittlevGL is now LVGL#
We found the name "LittlevGL" too long and meaningless, so we simplified it to "LVGL," which stands for "Light and Versatile Graphics Library." The name of the organization on GitHub has also changed to LVGL. Fortunately, GitHub does a great job managing renaming and redirects all queries to the new name. All previously cloned repos continue to work seamlessly.
New Website#
We have created a new website at https://lvgl.io. On this site, you can subscribe to newsletters to ensure you won't miss any news. Don't panic — we won't send more than 1-2 emails per month.
All related sites are also redirected to the lvgl.io main domain:
Establishing LVGL LLC#
It's been amazing to see how the user base of LVGL has grown. LVGL now has almost 100 contributors, more than 3,500 stars, and is downloaded every 5 minutes from GitHub. As time passed, LVGL was integrated into ESP-IDF, MCUXpresso, NuttX RTOS, Zephyr OS, and AliOS. This is amazing!
To provide a solid background for this growing interest in LVGL, we've decided to establish a company. Basically, everything will remain the same — for example, LVGL will continue to be available under the MIT license as before. The company allows us to run LVGL in a more reliable way and makes it easier to get partners and provide professional services.
And the company is called — you'd never guess it — LVGL LLC.
Services#
With LVGL LLC, we've started offering some services:
- Graphics design
- UI implementation
- Prototyping
- Widget development
- Dedicated support
To learn more, visit https://lvgl.io/services and don't hesitate to contact us if you have any questions.
Roadmap#
Besides services, we have a lot of plans and created a roadmap to share with you. We've started developing a drag-and-drop UI editor, a toolbox with advanced image, font, and audio converters, and we will create custom hardware modules too.
See the roadmap at https://lvgl.io/about
Contributors License Agreement#
As a company, we need to face a lot of new challenges. One of them is the more complicated legal stuff. LVGL can't be as successful without you, the tireless contributors. However, we need to be sure that all contributors are aware of the legal aspects of their contributions. It's nothing more than what is already stated in the MIT license, but accepting it in a more explicit form might help clarify any possible issues in the future.
Similarly to some other projects (e.g., ESP-IDF), we've also integrated a tool (provided by SAP) into all repositories of LVGL. It automatically comments on pull requests if a related contributor hasn't signed the agreement yet. The agreement is based on SAP's CLA, with only the company's name changed.
It's super easy to sign — you just need to click on an "I agree" button (it's connected to your GitHub account).
v7 is Released#
On May 18, a new major version was released, bringing a bunch of improvements. The release's official announcement was delayed a little to allow us to quickly fix some initial issues.
The most important upgrades are:
- New drawing engine which provides better anti-aliasing and cool new effects
- New CSS-like style system which allows more flexibility, less memory usage, and new style properties
Besides these, some widgets and enums were renamed or reworked. See the full Release note for more details.
Today (June 1, 2020), v7.0.1 is also released, where (hopefully) most of the initial bugs are fixed.
New Release Policy#
We've improved LVGL's versioning policy a little. In the future, you will find branches for every major release, such as release/v6 and release/v7. They contain the last released versions from that major version. This makes it possible to support older versions without bothering the newer ones.
The most recent version of LVGL is available in the master branch. Features and fixes are continuously merged into master, and there are bugfix or minor releases every two weeks.
From now on, a CHANGELOG.md is maintained to easily keep track of changes.
Join the Development#
To make the development of LVGL more transparent and to make contribution easier, we will create issues for every planned feature labeled with Help wanted. If you find a feature interesting and have some thoughts to share, feel free to comment on that issue!
Some of these issues are also labeled as Good first issue. If you're new to LVGL and have some spare time to spend programming, these issues are the best place to get your feet wet.
Summary#
We hope that you will like the new things!
As always, we are looking forward to hearing your feedback!
