uGFX v3.0 & Studio

[chrisjn52]

It's been some years now since the promised release of ugfx 3.0 and uGFX Studio, (which is greatly missed). Is there any likelyhood that this will eventually happen or is 2.9 the last release? 😢

[Joel Bodenmann]

µGFX v2.9 is not the last release. In fact, the v2.10 release is well overdue. We tend to put it off because most users & customers are just using the git `master` branch which we always keep in a working state. But yeah, we should definitely just pump out v2.10.

As for the µGFX studio: After the beta, we concluded that it was not good enough as it was missing a few features we deemed "must have" back then. In retrospect, that was probably a mistake and we should have just released it and improve it along the road. Live and learn.

As for µGFX v3.0: We have a working version of it. The only thing that's truly missing is blitting support which we deem essential in order to replace v2.x.
The issue is ultimately that we're constantly busy with projects that consume µGFX v2.x.
Furthermore, the embedded landscape changed drastically over the past couple of years. Nowdays it's almost normal to have an MCU that runs at well over 100 MHz with memory in the megabytes. As such, the very low resource consumption which is one of µGFX's USPs is no longer needed for "regular everyday projects".
µGFX is still being used, but these days it's usually in applications that most people are not exposed to such as mission & safety critical systems. As such, the publicly visible µGFX activities dropped down sharply.

We fully stand behind µGFX and support it where needed and we use it ourselves, but the last couple of years the landscape changed in a way that it's not necessarily of interest to most developers anymore. These days, especially hobbyists will find themselves working with embedded systems providing resources orders of magnitudes higher than what µGFX requires which allows for vibe-coding pretty much anything without ever having to worry about speed, latency or memory constrains.

Personally, I am currently developing an IP core to provide 2D hardware acceleration for FPGAs and ASICs which will ship with tight µGFX integration. I am hoping to implement a full 2D GPU eventually with shader support etc.

Bottom line is: If you like µGFX and it works for your use-case, don't be discouraged to continue using it. We're here to stay.