Kitepp Review – Simple App to Make Animations and Prototypes for UI

Today, the design community has too many tools to choose from and it remains difficult to pinpoint the one cut for all. With more and more arrivals gracing the market, each passing day designers can’t help but try different options before figuring out the best or at least what suits their projects at the time. In the midst of the competition, the Kite Compositor is one app that continues to leave its mark in the hearts of designers, developers, artists, and animation enthusiasts.

What exactly is Kite Compositor?

Kite Compositor is a native prototyping and UI animation design application for Mac. The app is famed for its intuitive timeline editor, robust scripting interface, and WYSIWYG canvas among other features that allow users to solve their animation problems in unprecedented fashion. Kite also has an iOS version that enables the user to interact with their work either on an iPhone or iPad.

Kite Features

Adaptive Interface

Kite Compositor features a powerful and responsive user interface that conforms to the realities of the design processes. It is made to scale and adapt to the user requirements or in line with imminent tasks.

Touchbar support

This app makes it easier for designers to glide through their animations change tools, play and halt the timeline, among other things without using the mouse. All these are made possible by the handy Touchbar support

Transitions

With Kite Compositor it is easy to navigate from one page of your documents to another depending on the needs thanks to inbuilt page transitions. The feature allows users unhindered page to page turning.

Presentation

The Kite app is built to allow various presentation views. You can either show your designs in full-screen presentation playback mode or opt for your own display size. Users can also tailor the background color and clarity of the playback window to the desired taste.

Multiple-page design

Kite app provides a way to factor your design into several pages of content where each tags an absolute timeline.

Generate native core animation code

This tool takes away guesswork out of the design process by offering an efficient way to create zero-dependency Swift or objective C-Code for animations. It takes care of the speeds of movement, size variations and the ease of transitions without much effort on the part of the user. The codes work for iOS and Mac platforms alike.

Timeline  editor

Kite Compositor comes with an integrated smart timeline edit that provides for manipulation of animation durations and keyframes. With a soft touch, you can set start and stop timeline with precision.

Inspector

Thanks to the inbuilt object inspector it is easy to edit the properties of the layers in your design. In a few clicks, you can fix the color scheme, harmonize the animation curves, and bring on core image filters with no difficulty at all. The inspector makes it trouble-free to get help when stuck.

Library

With the Kite Compositor library, you have layers and animations which you can drag and drop if you want to build an interface visually. Again, you can save reusable layer hierarchies for later utilization.

Adobe XD CC integration

With the Kite app, you can import your already flawless design from Adobe XD for further fine-tuning. Again, you can keep your animatable layer features such as colors, text attributes, Bezier paths, shadows, and so on.

Video and GIF export

Kite Compositor allows the sharing of design recordings. You can record your work and export it in both video and GIF format.

Import from Sketch

Kite’s native import feature allows importation of designs from Sketch. With this, you get to keep elements such as editable Bezier paths and text by preserving them as native Kite layers.

Scripting environment

This enables the addition of intricate logic to animations and interactions through the inbred JavaScript scripting engine. It provides for the addition of new layers, making changes to the property, fire animations and more. It also allows a designer to query and make live edits to running animation from an integral JavaScript console.  The scripting environment basically ensures you can add a touch of detail to the interactions to give the much-desired results.

Interactive real-time rendering

Considering Kite is built using a native Core Animation Technology it delivers graphics in real time. The Core Animation Composite engine ensures animations can fire interactively unrehearsed.

Templates

If you are the type who appreciate examples before you can get going, Kite app’s readymade templates and sample documents will help you begin working on ideas immediately. With the demonstrations, it remains easy to see how most features of the tool functions.

Pros: 

• Provides fantastic visual access to practically every aspect of Core Animation
• Has a relatively thorough support documentation 

Cons:

• Takes a little learning to take understand the animation principles fully 

Pricing

The Kite App is available at $99. However, users have a free trial period that lets them test the limits before deciding whether it’s worth buying.

Conclusion

Although Kite is a relatively new arrival, the host of features it brings to the table makes it a tool to watch. Its native core animation technology gives it an edge over other alternatives in the market. With its feature, rich toolkit designers can bring user interfaces to life quickly essentially changing design work and how animations are affected in the process and more particularly on MacOS.