Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What does Altia do?
A: Altia has spent over 20 years perfecting our User Interface Engineering tools and services. Our specialty is embedded systems. You know that touchscreen in your new car? Or on your new fridge or oven? We do that.
Altia provides the tools and talent to get beautiful graphical user interfaces (GUIs) and touchscreens into production on embedded hardware. Our graphics code is driving some of the coolest GUIs in a variety of industries – automotive, medical, appliances/white goods, home automation, consumer electronics, industrial, and Military/Aero/Government.
For more information about our software tools, go here. For more on our talented team, go here. And to see a sample list of customers, go here.
Q: What are Altia’s products?
A: Our award-winning suite of user interface development tools helps you get from concept to code.
Our core development and integration environment is Altia Design, a GUI builder and user interface design tool for laying out custom GUIs. For embedded systems, DeepScreen embedded GUI software automatically generates deployable C code for a variety of industry-leading hardware targets.
We have PhotoProto for those who want to design a GUI using Photoshop. For Interaction Designers who want to turn their Visio flowcharts into interactive user interface prototypes, we have FlowProto.
We also offer expert user interface design and development services to help plan, prototype and implement your next embedded user interface.
Q: What is your most popular product?
A: Altia Design. It is an embedded GUI builder that allows you to build fully-interactive user interfaces without hand coding. Altia Design can integrate with underlying functionality to form a complete model. Your Altia Design model can be used for testing all through the development cycle – allowing for actionable feedback from users and quick iterations, thus minimizing the resource impact of change requests.
Once you’ve built and tested your GUI in Altia Design, use our DeepScreen code generation tool to develop custom graphics C code optimized to exploit the features of your selected hardware.
Q: Does Altia do GUIs only for high power hardware? What about low power chips?
A: Altia DeepScreen has immense flexibility. Altia supports everything from high-powered, hardware accelerated platforms with lots of memory, to tiny and cost-effective sprite chips. To learn more about DeepScreen and how our tools help you avoid hand coding, go here.
Q What platforms does Altia support?
A The Altia Design editor software is Windows only, but we have an ever-growing list of DeepScreen hardware targets for your production embedded display. We can generate code for dozens of different platform configurations – from the low cost, low power hardware all the way to the more capable, high-end processors. We port graphics code from DeepScreen to hardware from some of the major industry players like Renesas, Freescale, Fujitsu, Altera, Toshiba, and more. We also support major mobile operating systems -- Android and iOS.
Q: Can Altia integrate with other tools like Stateflow software?
A: Altia Design is purposefully architected to allow integration with countless external development tools. Using our API, you can write external hand code, or use many logic modeling applications such as MATLAB, Simulink, and StateFlow from MathWorks; Rhapsody and Statemate from IBM; National Instrument’s MATRIXx SystemBuild and others to connect external logic to your Altia Design file.
Furthermore, we have additional products that serve as plug-ins for popular tools like Microsoft Visio and Adobe Photoshop, which allow you to integrate not only logic/behavior defined in those tools but graphics as well. Altia Design also lets you import 3D objects, Adobe Flash content, and vector graphics. Let your team continue creating in the tools they’re most comfortable with, then incorporate the objects into Altia Design.
Q: Can Altia actually help me build a GUI and get it running on hardware?
A: Absolutely. Our team of designers and developers has built GUIs of every shape, size, and scope. For more information on our professional services, go here.
Q: Do you have a program for higher education programs?
A: We have indeed worked with colleges and universities in in various capacities. Contact us and we’ll work hard to meet your needs.
Q: Who have you worked with in the past?
A: Here is a sampling of Altia’s customer list.
Q: Where is Altia located?
A: Our company is headquartered in beautiful Colorado Springs, Colorado. We also have a team in Detroit, Michigan – the heart of North American automotive – as well as countless team members around the world including France, the United Kingdom, China, and Japan. Let us know how we can help!
