For Developers: Kanzi – a cross platform development environment with OpenGL support

Kanziâ„¢ is a complete solution for design and deployment of advanced graphical user interfaces. It sports a complete toolchain to take products from design stages to target devices. Kanzi solution is technologically scalable from mobile and embedded devices to automotive applications. As a platform independent solution, Kanzi offers easy portability and rapid production cycle.

Key advantage of the Kanzi solution is "design-once, deploy everywhere" cross-platform support for the leading mobile operating systems, including Android, Blackberry, Linux, Maemo, Moblin, iPhone OS, Palm Web OS, Symbian OS, and Windows Mobile. Kanzi solution is build on top of industry standard OpenGL ES graphics API.

In terms of designer’s work flow, Kanzi provides the missing link between today’s leading 3D graphics content creation tools, such as 3DS Max, Maya and XSI on the one hand, and cell phones on the other hand. Artists can easily export their designs from these software packages to Kanzi SDK using COLLADA data format. Designers then rapidly compose the actual user interface application and apply all 3D graphics effects within the Kanzi SDK itself. The tool features a desktop runtime of the Kanzi engine to bring a real-time view of the final application at the desktop. This feature eliminates the need to continuously build the project to target device during development in order to inspect it. Therefore, design cycle shortens substantially while the designer is better able to realize her vision.

Kanzi runtime can be integrated to a wide variety of target devices, even those with different operating systems and hardware architectures. Applications made with Kanzi SDK will execute properly in all these devices, thus giving greater return on investment for the application developer.

Kanzi features a unified pipeline for OpenGL ES 2.0 and OpenGL ES 1.x based 3D graphics. The engine supports real-time streaming of data, texture and fragment shaders, multi-texturing and dynamic lighting. There is also a versatile animation framework supporting key frame animations, such as vertex, object and bone based animations.

Rightware will demonstrate a Mobile App Store application running in various mobile devices at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona from February 15th through February 18th. Mobile App Store is designed and implemented using Kanzi user interface solution that enables designers to quickly have their applications running in different target devices.

Read more about the Kanzi platform here.