Colorado Springs, Colo., September 20, 2005 – Altia, Inc., a Colorado-based software development company specializing in HMI (Human Machine Interface) and GUI (Graphical User Interface) development tools, announced today the upcoming release of Altia Design 7.0, which will include, among many other valuable new features, full 32-bit graphics support within the Altia Design editor. This new capability will give customers the ability to create designs that contain images with 32-bit transparency masks and alpha channels using the .png file import format. In addition, any object within the editor, whether it is a vector object, a raster image, or a group of objects, can be assigned its own opacity value. This affords users with a much greater amount of flexibility when creating animation, overlapping objects, and special effects such as clear windows, optical highlights, and 3D shading.

Users can create their GUI’s using Altia Design, an HMI/GUI development tool and Altia’s flagship product, using pre-built components or by creating their own components using graphic primitives or imported raster images. The addition of .png image import options makes creating objects with round edges such as capsule buttons much easier by eradicating the need to define transparent colors/pixels in the images. Layering and blending objects has now been made easier than ever. This is part of Altia's continuing efforts to bring designers the latest tools for creating high fidelity user interfaces that enhance the user's experience.

Using opacity values and the animation editor, objects can now appear to fade in and out, blend into the background, or grow brighter and dimmer as the animation progresses. Objects inside a group can have their own respective opacity as well, making the creative possibilities nearly endless.

About Altia
In 1991, four Hewlett Packard embedded systems developers discovered a need for graphics tools to prototype instrumentation front panels. These engineers spun-off and founded Altia to develop products to meet this need.

Altia's mission is to simplify the process of developing embedded and desktop systems by providing a cohesive set of HMI and GUI development tools that can be used from concept to final code. This simplification minimizes the amount of graphics that are thrown away as developers move through the cycles in the development process. With Altia's tools, embedded programmers can build graphics much faster and cheaper and ultimately raise the quality of the embedded user interface. More than 2,000 licenses of the company's flagship product, Altia Design, have been sold worldwide.

Altia, Inc. is located at 5030 Corporate Plaza Drive, Colorado Springs, CO, 80919. Tel: 719-598-4299, Fax: 719-598-4392, Web: www.altia.com.