This is the centerpiece of Altia’s toolchain, used for building high-performance, professional-looking prototypes and GUIs without hand coding graphics one line at a time.
Resources Industries: Ground Transportation
On-Demand Webinar: Introducing Altia CloudWare™—Run on Real Hardware, Right Now
Webinar_CloudWare_APAC
On-Demand Webinar: Pixels to Production: Getting Embedded GUIs to Market
Altia Design Toolchain
Altia Workflow | From Pixels to Production Hardware
Designed into over 100 million devices, companies all over the world trust Altia to get their best-looking, best-performing GUIs to market.
There are many reasons why Altia is GUI tool of choice for developers of all sorts of devices—automotive, medical, consumer and more. One of the top reasons is our streamlined workflow. Altia’s toolchain not only reduces the overall time to market with new GUI projects, but our software also gives companies the capability to turn their artist’s beautiful 2D and 3D artwork into a working GUI model and then deliver that same model all the way to production hardware.
Want to see how simple developing and deploying GUIs with Altia can be? Check out our latest video which shows the journey from graphics in Photoshop through to production hardware.
Would you like to meet with our GUI experts to discuss your next embedded display project and learn more about how Altia will help you get your product to market quickly? We invite you to schedule a demo with us today!
Meet Altia Design 13.3—Live Webinar
How do you create high impact GUIs even faster? Altia’s Director of Product Marketing, Jeff Urkevich, and Tim Day, Altia Design Product Manager, will show you how with a live webinar featuring Altia Design 13.3, the latest release of our GUI editor.
All are invited to join us on Wednesday, March 9, 2022 at 10 AM Eastern.
In this presentation, we will offer a first look at the top five new features in Altia Design 13.3.
- Programmable Scene Node
- Differential 3D Import
- Composite Timelines
- Blend Animations
- Responsive Layout
Altia Design 13.3 is rich with in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) design power as well as updates to make our customers’ experience with Altia easier and more pleasing than ever before. We can’t wait to show you Altia Design 13.3 in action!
(Are you unable to join us? Make sure to sign up anyway! We’ll send you a recording after the live event.)
Altia Releases Altia Design 13.3
Altia, an international leader in GUI design and development tools, today announced the release of Altia Design 13.3, the company’s flagship editing suite for the creation of embedded graphical user interfaces (GUIs).
The centerpiece of the Altia tool suite, Altia Design, allows GUI designers to turn static digital graphics into fully functional GUI prototypes—preparing graphics for code generation with Altia DeepScreen. This tool chain is used by professionals around the world in automotive, medical, industrial and consumer goods applications to get artists’ assets from third party design tools like Adobe Photoshop, Sketch, Maya and more onto production hardware.
Altia Design 13.3 takes GUI development to the next level with powerful new features, like:
- Programmable Scene Node, which allows developers to inject their own 3D content into a 3D scene; ideal for integration of mapping applications and ADAS
- Differential 3D Import, which gives users the capability to replace geometry in the scene without replacing or deleting any of the customization/animation already done in Altia
- Composite Timelines, which lets users create parent and child timelines – letting users control the sequence of child timelines by the parent
- Blend Animations, which allows for seamless transition between two complex, independent animations
- Responsive Layout, which allows developers to set rules for objects and design a GUI once to accommodate for a variety of screen sizes and resolutions
Also included in Altia Design 13.3 are important font module updates as well as enhancements for workflow, user interface and user experience.
“As embedded displays become increasingly pervasive across products in all industries, the need to inform and engage our devices users with 3D graphics and sophisticated animations is becoming an unspoken requirement,” noted Jeff Urkevich, Director of Product Marketing for Altia. “Altia Design 13.3 is packed with excellent features to empower our customers to design these graphics with ease.”
“The features and improvements in Altia Design 13.3 enable some very exciting opportunities for our customers’ next generation GUIs,” added Tim Day, Altia Product Manager. “With this release, we’ve added key in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) design power as well as updates to make our customers’ experience with Altia easier and more pleasing. As an Altia user myself, I am really excited about Version 13.3.”
Altia Design 13.3 is immediately available. Altia customers interested in upgrading to Version 13.3 should email their local FAE team or contact [email protected]. Designers and product developers interested in bringing their next generation GUIs to life with Altia can request a demo of Altia Design 13.3 today.
About Altia
Altia is a software company that provides graphical user interface design and development tools that can be used from concept to final product code. Our GUI editor, Altia Design, offers development teams the capability to implement a model-based development process for clear communication and accelerated user interface development. Our code generator, Altia DeepScreen, supports a vast range of low- to high-powered processors from a variety of industry-leading silicon providers. Altia generates pure C source code that is optimized to take full advantage of hardware resources. Graphics code generated by Altia is driving millions of displays worldwide – from automotive instrument clusters, HUDs, and radios to thermostats, washing machines and healthcare monitors. Our mission is to get the
best automotive, medical and consumer interfaces into production in the shortest time on the lowest- cost hardware.
Altia was founded in 1991. Its customers include automotive OEMs and Tier 1s like Continental Automotive, Denso, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, Ford Motor Company, General Motors, Honda, Renault, Magneti Marelli, Nippon Seiki, Valeo, Visteon and more – plus leading consumer device manufacturers like Electrolux, Whirlpool, NordicTrack and many others.
For more information about Altia, visit www.altia.com or email [email protected]. Follow Altia on LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube.
See 9-Slice Object in Action
Altia Design now includes the 9-Slice Object—a part of the Altia Design model library. The 9-Slice Object allows for smart scaling of GUI elements, preserving the integrity of images when resized.
The 9-Slice Object is a big timesaver. Designers can create graphics with 9-slice behavior in just seconds. Plus, by they only need to create a single graphic for a resizable widget. Since there are fewer images that need to be updated when changes are needed, designers also save time on changes. They also save memory, since fewer images in the GUI model means less memory consumed on hardware.
Developers can apply this new feature to GUI elements like buttons, sliders, scroll bars, text inputs, progress bars and background graphics.
Check out 9-Slice Object in action in this Altia Design feature video.
Interested in upgrading to the latest release of Altia Design, which includes 9-Slice Object and many more powerful features? Contact your local FAE or email [email protected].
Design Techniques for Optimizing Graphical User Interfaces for Embedded Devices
Designing high-quality graphical user interfaces (GUI) for devices with hardware constraints can be difficult. But this article demonstrates some ways to maximize design efficiency to make it easier. More efficient GUIs use less memory, CPU and GPU power when handling moving parts and animation, and allow the designer more room to be creative with their designs, instead of worrying about their hardware constraints.
Design with common elements
The example below shows a simple menu screen with some common elements:
- Each ICON_X is a button that would change the GUI to a different colored screen.
- The HOME button returns the GUI to the home screen.
- The HOURS:MINUTES:SECONDS element remains in the upper right corner for all screens.
- The ICON_X buttons and HOME button remain in the same location regardless of which ICON_X buttons selected.
If a GUI developer were to design a menu layout by copying and pasting the “TimeAndIconBanner” element (the top bar displaying HOURS:MINUTES:SECONDS, and the bottom bar displaying the Icon Buttons) for each of the screens in this GUI, the result is several duplicate objects in the GUI model. In the image below, each Card in the Deck Object that makes up the “IconScreens” contains the same TimeAndIconBanner element.
The TimeAndIconBanner element is a part of each individual screen under IconScreens, and the multiple instances of TimeAndIconBanner require a redraw of that element every time the screen is changed, resulting in unnecessary RAM and CPU usage.
To optimize this design and others like it, designers should isolate the common elements, TimeAndIconBanner in this case, and move them to a single instance one level up, as shown below.
Only one TimeAndIconBanner element now lives at the same level as IconScreens. This hierarchy illustrates the most efficient arrangement of design components, resulting in a corresponding change in the z-order of these groups within Altia Design, meaning that the highest level TimeAndIconBanner group is shown above the lower IconScreens group on the display.
Design with moving parts
Consider an animated speedometer. If the GUI is designed such that the entire screen is redrawn, instead of just the needle, more memory will be required for this GUI. Maintaining the static background image and animating only the needle on top creates the most efficient and memory-saving design. Another place to squeeze out some extra performance can be in reducing your fps. Some animations may not require the hardware’s maximum frame rate to achieve a satisfactory smoothness, and with Altia Design its simple to experiment and find a lower fps that works in your design.
If you would like to learn more about how Altia can help you optimize your GUIs to deliver the best performance using the least memory and power, we invite you to schedule a demo with a member of our expert GUI team today.