Altia’s User Experience Director, Steve Tengler, recently had an article published in Product Design and Development. “From Whence Come Failures” outlines various failure mechanisms and how to design for these different modes. Click here to read the full article.
Archive for the ‘Industry News’ category
Webinar – Altia Design 101: Ready, Set, GUI!
February 8th, 2012
Guided Tour of Altia Design 10
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
1:00 PM EST
Altia Design allows you to rapidly create interactive user interfaces. In this webinar, Brian Stewart will walk you through Altia Design and build a demo automotive interface from scratch. This one hour webinar is ideal for anyone interested in a condensed overview of core functionality as well as popular tips and tricks for designing beautiful interfaces. Brian is one of Altia’s Senior HMI Developers and has over seven years in the trenches with Altia Design, including hundreds of hours providing training and support for Altia customers.
Register now now for an expert tour and demo, including:
- Overview of Design – Learn how to navigate your design and virtualize your model for easy review.
- Animation, Stimulus, and Control – Learn how to build interactive objects from the ground up.
- Decks, Image Objects, and Text I/Os – Learn how to leverage these three existing library objects to create any interface you can imagine.
- Live Demo – Brian will build a multi-screen automotive interface from scratch.
New Appliance Demo
February 1st, 2012Put the FUN in FUNctional – Altia Refrigerator Demo
Check out this refrigerator touch screen demo we built with Altia Design. Watch us change temperatures, ice settings and the time, write a note, manage a shopping list and even play a game on this stunning and simple display.
To download a fully interactive version of the demo to play with, contact sales@altia.com
The Invisible UI
January 17th, 2012While browsing the latest and greatest from CES, this cool new technology popped up:
I’ve personally always found typing on the iPhone awkward to say the least. Must be my fat thumbs. But this technology didn’t reveal a ‘eureka’ moment for me. What came to mind:
1) Is the best user interface an invisible one? (Reminds me of a blog series we did about User Experience. Here’s a post about OnStar http://www.altia.com/blog/2011/03/28/interfacing-about-user-experiences-part-four-onstar/ …their user interface is essentially just one button)
2) How do we (humans, technology users) like to ‘memorize’ something like the unique taxonomy this method uses?
3) 5th graders were able to learn it. Compared to what, a standard keyboard? Why 5th graders? What about my grandma, would she find this easy to learn and use?
What do you think?
Is this technology something that could stick? Can you see Apple or Google snatching up a company like this and incorporating this into iOS6+ or Android?
CES without Steve Jobs
January 17th, 2012
The Apple Effect
“But wait,” you say, “Steve Jobs never went to CES, so this year is no different.” You’re right, of course. But the net he cast always permeated the show. “What was Apple doing next?” “How did Apple’s products released last year affect what the rest of the world would do this year?” “How do other manufacturers fit into Apple’s eco system, or battle the juggernaut?”
This year, the Vegas show seemed different. Oddly so. Nobody was talking about Apple, but iPhones and iPads were being shown everywhere. Mostly used as generic touch screens that play host to apps that control or monitor one or more of your home appliances or electronic devices. Check your oven temperature from your phone. Adjust your stereo from your pocket. Get the status of your home security system. Steer you robotic vacuum cleaner. Whatever. Of course, Android and other tablet variants were also used as the remote control for your life. But the Apple fear factor seems to have subsided, even if their devices where ubiquitous. Dear Cupertino, welcome to the mainstream.
Splash-worthy?
2012 Altia GUI Design Contest
January 11th, 2012
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Win Internship + Scholarship! Calling all Students! Altia wants you to design a cutting-edge user interface using our user interface engineering tools. Create any sort of automotive GUI – could be a driver information cluster, center console/infotainment, heads-up visual display, or even rear-seat entertainment – that offers an outstanding user experience. If your design comes out on top, we’ll show you the money! Head over to http://www.altia.com/contest and register to get started. When? Who’s judging? Who is invited? Questions? |
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Altia at CES 2012
January 9th, 2012
Source: http://www.theverge.com/2012/1/7/2690862/ces-2012-biggest-news
CES starts this week, with countless tech blogs announcing the gadgets buried within. (A few of my favorites: The Verge - Mashable – Gizmodo’s live blog – Engadget) And just like last year, our intrepid CEO (Mike Juran) will be at the show, meeting with various parties and sending his thoughts back via this very blog. For a quick recap of his writing from last year check out these four blog posts. Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4 (Including a peek at some cool customer work we did!)
Altia Design 10.1 Available Today
November 29th, 2011Altia Design 10.1 is now available! As we recently wrote, we’ve followed up the huge launch of Design 10 with this release– featuring several key enhancements and a large increase in supported hardware targets. To read more details on the release, go here. Or, check out this quick list of some of the enhancements.
New targets
1) Renesas DR4-3D OpenGLES 1.1 (V850E2)
New cost-effective chipset with high performance graphics for automotive cluster applications, focused on 3D capabilities.
2) Renesas SH7266 Software Render
3) Fujitsu Sapphire Custom 2D (MB91590)
Low to mid-cost intrustment cluster application for Automotive
Improved Targets
–Renesas Dx4-H Custom 2D (V850E2)
–Freescale i.MX53 OpenGL ES 2.0
–Freescale i.MX51 OpenGL ES 2.0
–Freescale i.MX51 OpenGL ES 1.1
–Freescale i.MX51 OpenVG 1.1
Enhancements:
Faster text rendering in DeepScreen
-Get your GUI running on hardware sooner . DeepScreen saves even more hand coding time, especially when rendering lots of text
Improved i.MX51 SDK
Improved alpha channel support on Altera D/AVE
-Better graphics for better user interfaces
See the Enhancement Summary Documentation for a full list of fixes
New release: Altia Design 10.1 — Coming November 29th
November 17th, 2011Back in August, we released a huge update to our UI development kit. Altia Design 10 was a huge step forward — improvements in productivity, effects, and design management. For full details on that release, go here.
Now, we’ve hunkered down and put together further refinement to the Altia Design 10 product with Design 10.1 — available November 29th. For full details on the release, go here. Here’s a quick look at what’s under the hood.
New targets
- Renesas DR4-3D OpenGLES 1.1 (V850E2)
New cost-effective chipset with high performance graphics for automotive cluster applications, focused on 3D capabilities.
- Renesas SH7266 Software Render
- Fujitsu Sapphire Custom 2D (MB91590)
Low to mid-cost intrustment cluster application for Automotive
Improved Targets
- Renesas Dx4-H Custom 2D (V850E2)
- Freescale i.MX53 OpenGL ES 2.0
- Freescale i.MX51 OpenGL ES 2.0
- Freescale i.MX51 OpenGL ES 1.1
- Freescale i.MX51 OpenVG 1.1
Enhancements:
Faster text rendering in DeepScreen
-Get your GUI running on hardware sooner . DeepScreen saves even more hand coding time, especially when rendering lots of text
Improved i.MX51 SDK
Improved alpha channel support on Altera D/AVE
-Better graphics for better user interfaces
See the Enhancement Summary Documentation for a full list of fixes
Innovation Encounter: Steve Tengler’s Day Out
October 24th, 2011–Steve Tengler is Altia’s User Experience Director. He chronicles his day at Innovation Encounter 2011.–
[7:00 am] The alarm. Ugh. On a Saturday? Really??
[9:25 am] Very cool. At first I thought this Innovation Encounter 2011 (hosted by Lawrence Tech University) was solely one local university, but I found out over breakfast that twenty-five (25) universities participate in the over-arching program and today’s contestants have traveled from a subset of that consortium. As the teams arrive from St. Louis, Chicago, Spokane, etc., I’m letting the coffee wash over my gray matter and fire-up the synapses. I obviously need to be “on my game” today as a judge.
[9:28 am] OK, I just realized I forgot my wallet this morning. Ugh. More coffee.
[9:40 am] Noah Webster of Leon Speakers, the sponsor for today’s event, took questions and provided cheerful answers. The beaming sunshine (which has been a stranger to southeastern Michigan lately) framed this inspirational start of the day. Bright. Innovation. We’re ready! I learned that several teams stayed up until 4am, so I might be well rested in comparison.
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