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Pixate has developed a product designed to bridge the communications gap between engineers and members of a design team as they work together to create a mobile application.
The firm has emerged from stealth mode with a new technology that lets designers create sophisticated animations and interactions for a new app, and refine their designs, without writing a single line of code.
“Imagine if you could draw a picture in photoshop, but then you could actually play with a real app on your phone. In other words, it’s not app picture anymore, it’s a real thing,” said Pixate founder Paul Colton. “You draw it in our editor on the Web, and what we do is translate that drawing, that information, into a native app on Android or iOS.”
Colton said Pixate’s technology takes designs from a Web-based tool and uses the information to create a prototype of the application that runs natively on Apple’s or Google’s mobile platforms.
“We’re empowering the designer to do something they could never do before — get a lot closer to the real thing,” Colton said. “The designer, sitting with a manager or the CEO, could literally take an idea much further than ever before. They could hand the phone over to the CEO and ask … ‘Is this what you want?'”
Pixate was incubated by Y Combinator, and in 2013 raised $3.8 million from Accel Partners. The company has been working with a small number of companies, including Twitter, Pandora and Cisco, to refine its technology.
Now, it is offering the platform to the thousands of designers that have expressed interest through a private launch of the product, in which the technology will become more broadly available sometime this fall.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
