Altia at CES 2012

January 9th, 2012 by Jesse Marble No comments »

 

CES 2012 Logo

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!)

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Outsmarting Your Smart Device

January 8th, 2012 by Cheryl Falk No comments »

How Not to Get Punked By Your Navigation System

My husband surprised me with some pretty great gifts this holiday season, but the one that I was most excited about was my new Garmin nüvi® 2495LMT, a navigation system that allows me to use touch or voice controls to get turn-by-turn directions to where I need to go.  As a true (and proud) Altian, I get really excited about devices like this one – and I am ever-eager to dig in and get my own sense of their usability and user experience. (No, I am not an expert in user experience, but I do work with a few of them!)

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Tengler Talks Driver Attention: Part One

January 5th, 2012 by Jesse Marble No comments »

–“Tengler Talks Driver Attention” is a three-part series about Steve Tengler’s recent written contributions to the Driver Attention/Distraction/Inattention discussion.  Coming soon to the Altia blog: “SAE’s Hands-Free Definition” and “The Lorax of Driver Distraction.”  Stay tuned – and drive safely! –

ergonomics in design cover HFES

Ergonomics in Design - publication

  Steve Tengler Discusses Management of Driver Workload in HFES Journal

Before Steve Tengler (our esteemed User Experience Director) joined Altia, he managed the global HMI development team at OnStar.  Steve was responsible for not only developing new and innovative in-vehicle technologies to aid, inform and entertain drivers, but also to deliver these new features and functionality via methods that were – first and foremost – safe.

Steve and Scott Geisler, Engineering Group Manager at General Motors, wrote an article introducing some of methods their development teams used to achieve these goals in an article titled “General Motors’ Approach to Managing Driver Workload: A Brief Overview.” This article is now available in the October 2011 issue of Ergonomics in Design: The Quarterly of Human Factors Applications (EID), a journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society.

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The Personified UI

January 4th, 2012 by Tristan Plank No comments »

–Tristan Plank is a guest contributor and the Lead Human Factors Researcher and UI Designer at HF Designworks in Boulder, CO.–

Apple's Genie Effect

Apple's Genie Effect

Products with Personality

One of the most significant factors affecting satisfaction with an interface is the personality we assign to it. Every user brings personal experiences with them when they use a system.  It is these experiences that blend with the designed aspects of the UI to form a characterization. We then project a persona onto the systems we use…and an identity emerges. Sometimes we like these identities: they can be helpful, slick, and beautiful. They can become our friends and confidants as they possess our valuable information. Sometimes we even miss them when their “new personalities” are released, whether it’s a simple update for our phone interface, or an overhauled OS design.

At other times, UIs feel more like a bully pushing us around, or the snooty know-it-all correcting our every move. Paul Miller of The Verge recently demonstrated this curious personification process in his rant about condescending interfaces, an opinion piece that provides an entertaining case study on UI design.

Priorities: Usability or Visual Design?

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Altia Design 10.1 Available Today

November 29th, 2011 by Jesse Marble No comments »

Altia 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 targetsbox-blog

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

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New release: Altia Design 10.1 — Coming November 29th

November 17th, 2011 by Jesse Marble No comments »

box-blogBack 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

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Innovation Encounter: Steve Tengler’s Day Out

October 24th, 2011 by Steve Tengler No comments »

–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??

innenc1 [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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Quick Stroll Down Memory Lane

October 21st, 2011 by Steve Tengler No comments »

–Steve Tengler is Altia’s User Experience Director. He’s also a proud Wolverine.–

Yesterday I happened to be on The University of Michigan’s engineering campus in Ann Arbor, MI, for the IBM Symposium, which was not only a great chance to how successful companies like General Motors and Visteon have used IBM’s tools (and Altia) to provide winning software solutions but it was also a chance for me to wander down memory lane. North campus! GO BLUE! It was a moment of pride until …

… I decided for laughs to try my old User ID in the campus computer. Yeah, yeah. I know: two decades have past. When I was last on North Campus, they asked us to try this new thing called “e-mail”, which my theatre-major girlfriend ridiculed by asking, “So wait, it’s a way for engineers to communicate? Hmmm … sounds geeky.” So, no, I wasn’t expecting my password to work, but I was expecting something better than this:

What the?!!?

What the?!!?

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Thoughts from #IUE2011

October 13th, 2011 by Steve Tengler No comments »

–Steve Tengler, Altia’s User Experience Director, just finished attending and presenting at the 2011 Internet User Experience Conference in Ann Arbor, MI. His initial reactions here.–

Dichotomy. What I found fascinating this week at the 7th annual Internet User Experience (IUE) Conference in Ann Arbor, MI, was the dichotomy between this gathering and a conference I attended earlier this year not thirty miles away. At the unnamed conference I attended a session based around the X-factor of various products, but the questions and discussion quickly diverged to the UX-factor (or User Experience Factor). While the executives only mildly schooled in user interfaces opined about UX being the new battleground of competitive differentiation, journalists scribbled copious notes.

At IUE this week, there were no notepads, Dictaphones or cameras, but the same conclusion about UX’s influence on product excellence came forward, and the informed opinions shared data and conclusions. So … in case you’re a journalist or executive who missed it, here are the lessons I learned during the exchange:

1. “Uniqueness is not the same as innovation.” This quote summarized a few of the presentations very succinctly. In other words, you can create something completely different from others, but completely undesirable … and the only way to avoid that expensive fate is User-Centered Design.
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WEBINAR: Guided Tour of Altia Design 10

October 11th, 2011 by Jesse Marble No comments »

Click to register now

In August, we released the latest version of our HMI development software — Altia Design 10.  This new release features some huge advances in productivity, effects and design management. In our upcoming one hour webinar, Brian Stewart, Altia Senior HMI Developer with seven years in the trenches with Altia Design, will  walk us through the new features, explaining how they will benefit you, your team and your next Altia user interface project.

Register now for an expert tour of these new Altia Design 10 features:

Navigator – This feature is the blueprint for your Altia projects.  Whether the design is your own or belongs to a colleague, Navigator lets you quickly explore and understand designs.  Get up to speed – fast!

Vectors — Not new, but improved support for SVG content!  Expand your artistic opportunities by including crisp, clean vector images in your HMI.  As a bonus, vector images take up less memory, so you can start shopping in the lower memory (and lower cost) hardware aisle.

The Blur Effect – Enhance your raster images with this new feature, by adding motion effects or combine with transparency for cool reflections on stationery objects in your display.

The Flash Object – This Altia Design add-on lets you import pre-existing Flash content into your user interfaces.  Add engaging media for splash screens, special alerts, seasonal offerings and more.

Classing – Break down complex interfaces into manageable pieces.  Work in parallel and then merge separate projects seamlessly.  Apply changes to multiple objects at the same time.

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