Flinto – Designing Your Animated Transitions in Now Made Easy

As far as creating cutting-edge interactive app prototypes are concerned, there are more than a dozen alternatives available for creative minds. Lately, several new tools meant for design have been ushered into the fray in an effort to offer users a better experience in their work. While there are many options, it goes without saying that some apps and prototyping platforms have captured the attention of the design community than others. Flinto is one tool worth highlighting in this regard.

What is Flinto?

Simply put, Flinto is a Mac tool used in creating advanced animated and interactive prototypes of app designs. Launched in 2012, this easy to use application is premised on the quantity over quality approach to prototyping. It avails resources that allow prompt and hassle-free generation of transition-based animations and efficient screen management in the face of many app screens. With Flinto it is easy to track the continuity of many screens and all the accompanying transitions and interactions.

Features

Animated Transitions

Flinto comes with an innovative transition designer that allows users to come up with self-made animated transitions without much effort. With direct manipulation gestures, one can control and customize animations between two screens depending on the setting of the resulting screen and the time-based effects applied to the transition. Flinto’s Transition Designer is quite intuitive and is set to allow users to get different results by making varying adjustments. With this, you can tone the screen both ways, scale and bring into play curve and spring effects among other actions.

Micro-Interactions

The app also comes with a Behaviour Designer that enables the creation of micro-interactions within screens. This works well with aspects of design such as switches, buttons or looping and also scroll based animations.

Customizable scrolling actions

Flinto makes it easy to manage all your screens regardless of whether they are in hundreds or just a few. With an ingenious design that allows the addition of a customizable scrolling at various points in the creation process, one can develop incredible scroll-based animations such as collapsing headers. This helps keep different aspects of the designs in check to ensure they do not get complex and bulky with time. In essence, you can get all your screens in the mix but still, keep the work simple. And with Flinto’s free-form canvas you can organize screens to your taste.

Gestures

Flinto comes with over ten gestures that facilitate seamless navigation of prototypes with simple actions such as taps, swipes, scrolls and 3D touch. The gestures facilitate increased usability.

Drawing Tools

Flinto offers powerful vector drawing tools for designers to come up with simple mockups, edit shapes and text imported from other tools such as Sketch. You can design UI in Flinto or even animate vector curves and have everything recorded right on the platform.

Preview

When it comes to previewing your designs, Flinto has got everything covered with an iOS viewer app. In real time you can have a sneak peak of your work on any compatible devices.

Sound effects and video layers

With Flinto you can spruce up your designs with the strategic inclusion of sound effects and video layers. In reality, with every gesture, you can annex an audio file for UI sound effects. Similarly, you can include video or GIF files in your designs if necessary.

3D rotation

With design, it is always better if you beautiful animations to add to your prototype. Usually, animations make the design more interactive and lively. Flinto excels in this light considering it offers simple 3D rotation tools. This allows users to create stunning animations that add a touch of life to the final result.

Learning and support documentation

Flinto boasts of one the most active user community besides the extensive help documentation and over one hundred tutorials. These readily available resources make it easy to learn and take optimal advantage of the tool.

Pros:

• The app is easy to learn and quite intuitive to use
• Allows importation of files from Sketch through Flinto plug-in
• Comes with built-in gestures
• Transition tags enable the reuse of animations across screens

Cons:

• Lacks animation value export
• Scroll groups take a lot of set up

Pricing

Flinto is available on a yearly license model. The annual license costs $99 including full year free updates. You can also enjoy discounts on volume purchase as follows; 5-9 copies at $89 each, 10+ copies at $79 each. Otherwise, there is a 14-day free trial version.

Flinto for educational use

For educational and non-commercial use Flinto can be purchased at 50% discount.

Conclusion

With Flinto both seasoned designers and newbies can create top of the line apps in record time without having to deal with tones of pages of overwhelming code. Therefore, if you have been looking for a tool endowed with all the resources to help you develop an app with fancy transitions, delightful animations, responsive buttons among other user-friendly features, this is worth checking out.