Systems engineers take advantage of Altia’s significant usability upgrade to create real-time user interfaces in a fraction of the time.
Colorado Springs, Colo., February 20, 2006 – Altia, Inc., developers of Altia Design user interface design tools, released its most significant upgrade in its company’s 14-year history. It provides major capability and usability upgrades that make it more productive for its core customer base of systems engineers, while also making it accessible to a broader range of users including graphics artists and interaction designers.
Why is this important? Manufacturers are adding flat panel displays to products at an astonishing rate. Consequently, systems and software engineers spend a growing amount of time designing and writing user interface code. This added time often forces a late product release – costing the manufacturer millions in lost revenue and unrealized market share. Altia Design 8.0 drastically reduces the amount of time systems engineers spend on user interface development. Altia Design 8.0 helps manufacturers get these user interface intensive products to market on time.
Systems engineers and embedded systems programmers use Altia to achieve these time savings by eliminating the task of writing user interface code by hand. Altia Design accepts graphics from tools such as Adobe Photoshop and helps turn them into working user interface prototypes and deployable code. Interaction designers find Altia Design 8.0 more efficient than multimedia authoring tools such as Macromedia Flash and scripting languages.
Systems engineers also benefit by easily connecting their user interfaces to simulation models or external application software. This gives the systems engineer a convenient way to test their system models. Manufacturers such as Ford, GM, Lockheed Martin and Panasonic have already capitalized on the benefits of Altia Design.
Altia Design 8.0 is appreciably more productive that it’s predecessor. In this release, Altia added dozens of usability features including easier object placement and sizing, a more flexible color palette, support for 32 bit alpha channels, a full featured dynamic text object, support for standard operating system fonts, dynamic layout containers and many more. Altia also added a training video, which helps users start useful work within an hour.
How did Altia pack in so many usability upgrades in such a short amount of time? According to Michael Juran, president of Altia, "We broke through the development barrier when we started using our own tools to rebuild our own user interface. In an incredibly short amount of time, our engineers delivered features and capabilities that rival those found in tools from Adobe or Microsoft. The difference is we’ve built it with a fraction of the resources.”
Altia’s tools are used to build graphical user interfaces (GUIs), human-machine interfaces (HMIs), human-computer interaction (HCIs) and real-time system user interfaces. Altia Design outputs C, Java, XML, SVG and generated code for operating systems including Windows, WinCE, Linux, Unix, X, WindRiver VxWorks, QNX and custom RTOSs. Altia’s tools are used for prototyping, requirements gathering and visual design. They run on PCs, Unix and Linux. An Apple Mac OS X version will be released soon.
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.
Editorial Contact Paul de Curnou | Reader Contact Altia, Inc. |