Mitya trial is randomly freezing/crashing

There's a bug reported by some users where Mitya randomly freezes up or crashes. The app seems to freeze for several actions including importing an image, running a prototype, broadcasting to iPhone or even quitting. We have isolated this bug and it appears to happen whenever an image is deleted from a screen and Mitya attempts to rebuild the animation timeline. A fix has been developed and is currently under testing. We'll have the update out in a couple of days. Sorry for the inconvenience it's been causing you :(.

Mitya is officially live!

We're thrilled to announce that Mitya is now available for download at our store.

It's been a while since we originally showed the alpha build to the design community. Since then, designers from around the world have been trying out Mitya and sharing their ideas.  We've taken all that feedback to fine tune Mitya. And today, we're officially going live. It's a big day for us and we'd like to thank all of you for your support and feedback!

Interaction Prototyping with Mitya
Mitya is the fastest way to animate and test your app interactions.
- Design your screens and states visually. Mitya's Animation Engine will automatically animate all differences between these states
- Need more control? Use the built-in timeline editor to precisely execute your animations
- Test your prototype directly on iPhone
- Export to HTML5. Share with clients or embed in an iframe directly on your site



Preview on iPhone
As designers, we find it super important to test interactions directly on the target device, which is why we're launching the companion iOS app for FREE. We strongly believe that the design and viewer app should work in tandem, so there's no extra charge for the iOS app.
Download iOS app

And so much more...
This is just the beginning for Mitya. We're working hard to make Mitya the fastest way to prototype interactions and can't wait to show you what's next.

Prototyping the Flickr iOS app

In today's demo, we're going to build an animation from Flickr. In this interaction, we have one animation while entering the detail screen and a completely different animation while returning to the main screen. As before, you can download the assets from here if you want to follow along

Prototyping the Pinterest iOS app

In this demo, we're going to build the simple card animation from Pinterest's iOS app. You can download the assets here if you want to follow along.

Sharing Animation data with Engineering

Sharing animation data of our prototype with the engineering team is super important, but fairly complicated. I've just implemented a feature in Mitya to make this a lot easier. If you click on Project | Get Anim Data for Engineers, you'll get a screen like this:

Right now, the data is grouped, first by start time, then by image. Is there any other data you guys need to share with the engineering team?

Getting started with Mitya

In this tutorial, we're going to use Mitya to prototype a simple interaction, based on Any.do, a to do app for iOS and Android. Here's what the final output is going to look like.

You can download the assets here if you want to follow along.

The major steps to create the interaction are:
1. Create your interaction's start and end states
2. Define a hot spot for interaction
3. Animate the interaction with the timeline
4. Preview the interaction
5. Export to HTML5

Step 1: Create your interaction's start and end states
First, let's define what our app must look like before the interaction begins.

Creating the start state

1. Double click the empty space to create the start screen.

2. Double click inside the screen. Mitya will ask you to choose images for your prototype. Add the images Today, Tomorrow and Upcoming.

3. Arrange them one below the other, so it looks like the screenshot on the right. (Shift drag to lock movement to one axis). This is going to be our interaction's start state.

Alpha is now up!

Mitya (alpha) is now ready for you to try! There are two versions - an online version that will work in any modern browser and a Mac app. There are a few feature differences between these two versions. You can see more details here.

The alpha is obviously only an early look into Mitya - there's so much more to do. If you have time to try out the alpha, I'd love to hear your thoughts and feedback!

Comics, Rage and Poetry

For introducing Mitya, I wanted to capture the predicament of today's Interaction Designer in comic form. After running through several different ideas and storyboards, three finalists emerged. The one on the home page is the winner. I wanted to share with you the other two finalists.

A simple 'rage comic' version:

A much longer and poetic version.

Interaction Designers need some love too.

And it's coming.

Update: This is the one that was originally used on the homepage

The Birth of Mitya

Imagine an author had to write a novel using Photoshop. Or, a programmer had to code in Word. Doesn't even make sense, right? But this is what Interaction Designers are forced to put up with right now. IxDs have to use After Effects, a static video editing tool, or Quartz Composer, a programming tool, to create their visual interactions! They have to do their job using tools that were originally built for someone else!

Now, After Effects and Quartz Composer are both excellent tools - no doubt about that. But they were not built with IxDs in mind. Every artist needs tools that are built specifically for their needs. Just the way graphic designers have Photoshop and video editors have After Effects, interaction designers need their own, custom tool.

It was frustrating for us to prototype our interactions using existing tools, which is why we started making Mitya. We’ll have more to share with you as the days go by. We hope to hit private beta next month and hopefully more Interaction Designers will enjoy what we’re building.