1 Year

One year ago this month Kite Compositor came to life as a powerful new way to design animation and interaction. I’m so pleased with the response and enthusiasm I’ve seen for the product in just one year’s time. Designers, developers, artists, and animation enthusiasts continue to bend the app to solve their animation tasks in ways I never thought possible. Thank you so much for your support!

There are so many interesting ideas and new features I have planned for Kite alongside a growing list of improvements to the basics. Here’s to another year of progress and upward momentum!

Kite 1.9

Kite 1.9 is now available with bug fixes for some of the most common issues and crashes reported by our users. Also, a few new features:

  • Support for Swift 4’s syntax

    Code generated with Kite is now compatible with Swift 4’s new syntax.

  • Core Animation Archives: Import, Preview, and Export

    Core Animation Archive

    What is a Core Animation archive (.caar)? A CAAR file is an archived form of a layer tree and its animations (using NSKeyedArchiver and NSKeyedUnarchiver). You will find this type of file used by many of the macOS system apps to display simple vector artwork, explainer animations, and loadable layer trees that save hundreds of lines of Core Animation code.

    You can directly open CAAR files from Kite’s File menu. Export a CAAR file from the File ▸ Export menu. Preview a CAAR file by using QuickLook in the Finder. Note that scripts and actions are not exported to CAAR files due to these objects only existing in the Kite environment.

    To see an example of how to load CAAR files in your Mac and iOS apps, check out the example GitHub repo.

  • Other noteable changes

    • A preference to turn off haptic trackpad feedback
    • New built-in isometric perspective transforms in the transform editor
    • Support for animating the transform.scale.xy and sublayerTransform.scale.xy key paths

Changelog Details

  • New: Support for Swift 4 Syntax for Kite’s code generation
  • New: Adds support for importing, exporting, and previewing Core Animation archive files (.caar)
  • New: Adds support for animating the ‘transform.scale.xy’ and ‘sublayerTransform.scale.xy’ keypaths
  • New: Adds new built-in isometric perspective transforms in the transform editor
  • New: Adds preference to turn off haptic trackpad feedback
  • Change: Simplifies page-to-page animations by having the animated-to layer’s timeline start when the page appears on screen, not at the start of the initial presentation
  • Change: Small tweaks to the app’s toolbar to make it more visually appealing
  • Change: Improves the script editor’s syntax highlighting for single quotes and backticks
  • Bug fix: Fixes bug in code generation where a Swift CIVector would not have its closing parenthesis
  • Bug fix: Fixes a bug where dragged keyframes would be rounded to only one decimal place forcing them to snap to an incorrect position
  • Bug fix: Negative speed timeline values now draw at with the correct duration
  • Bug fix: Fixes a bug with Sketch import that could detach a page’s symbols during import
  • Bug fix: Fixes a bug where the source layer for a Map Layer Value action would not be saved when set via drag and drop
  • Bug fix: Fixes a bug where drawing a new layer while constraining the aspect ratio of the layer would flip the layer orientation sometimes (Thanks Shannon!)
  • Bug fix: Fixes an issue with the ‘Play at Begin Time?’ popup dialog where the dialog title didn’t match the action buttons

Get the Update

To see all of the changes that went into this release, including more bug fixes, be sure to check out the release notes for more details.

To get the update, click Kite ▸ Check For Updates… in Kite’s main menu.