future development

[pljakobs]

I'm opening this as an issue since it seems to be the way to reach out to other developers to this library.

We've been functionally mostly stuck ever since we've added font support a few years ago. some of my develoment hit the limits of what this library can do, especially with the limited available RAM on some platforms (even on the Teensy!) because I make a lot of use of canvas objects.
I have, over the last months, driven two major projects:

• a seemless 24 Bit interface that allows to decouple applications from the underlying hardware bit depth (that is: 16 Bit applications should continue to work even if the hardware supports 24 bits and 24 bit applications should work without having to know if the hardwre supports 24 bit or not)
• a bitmapped canvas object. This is really inspired from the work I did decades back on the Amiga. GFXiCanvas allows to define a canvas that is really composed of a number of GFXcanvas1 single bit objects. Up to eight bits are allowed and thus up to 256 colors are possible. This, of course, requires a color palette, just as back in the Amiga days, and the palette can be defined using RGB24 values.

At this point, I have a prototype that works, albeit very rough, for setting color dots and displaying them.
If you want to help work out the bugs or help optimize the code (it's pretty slow and non optimized right now), have a look at https://github.com/pljakobs/Adafruit-GFX-Library/tree/Feature-24Bit

thx

pj