Canonical Definitions
Motion & UI Engineering Glossary
Authoritative definitions and mathematical frameworks for spring physics, motion tokens, state machines, and modern interface architecture.
Motion Development Environment (MDE)
Our term for a tool where interactive UI motion is designed and shipped: states, physics and logic are built visually and the same file runs in your app through a runtime.
Motion Tokens
Standardized design tokens that quantify animation parameters—such as spring stiffness, damping, mass, and easing curves—in a machine-readable format across platforms.
Spring Physics
A mathematical animation model based on second-order differential harmonic oscillators that calculates movement using stiffness, damping, and mass rather than fixed durations.
Motion Compiler
In ExodeUI, the build step that turns an open .exode file into a smaller .bexode file for production. It does not generate React, Swift or Flutter source code.
Motion Runtime
The lightweight client execution layer that drives spring numerical integration and state machine transitions in the target application.
State Machine UI
A computational model where an interactive interface component exists in exactly one of a finite number of deterministic states at any given time, transitioning in response to events.
Physics UI Animation
The practice of driving user interface motion using physical simulations of velocity, momentum, friction, and mass rather than static time-based curves.
Motion Components
Self-contained, interactive UI components that encapsulate visual styling, spring physics, gesture listeners, and state machine logic in a single reusable unit.
Design-to-Code
Any workflow that turns a visual design into working product UI with less manual recoding, whether by generating code or by shipping the design file itself.
Interactive Animation
Animation that directly responds to, and can be influenced by, active user inputs such as touches, pointer movements, drags, and keypresses in real time.
Micro-Interactions
Subtle, single-purpose animations that provide immediate sensory feedback, convey status, and enhance usability during interface actions.
Animation Timeline
A chronological visual editor where keyframes, easings, and sequencing tracks are arranged across time to orchestrate multi-layer motion sequences.
Gesture Animation
Real-time animation driven continuously by touch gestures such as swipes, pinches, flings, and pans, maintaining 1:1 finger tracking.
Spring Damping
The physical parameter that introduces frictional resistance to an oscillating spring, governing how quickly the animation dissipates energy and settles to rest.
Spring Stiffness
The mechanical tension coefficient that dictates how forcefully a spring accelerates toward its target resting position.
Cubic Bezier Curve
A mathematical parametric curve defined by four control points used in CSS transitions and Web Animations to dictate the rate of change over a fixed duration.
Easing Function
A mathematical formula that alters the rate of an animation over time, producing non-linear effects such as ease-in, ease-out, and bounce.
Motion Export
How a design tool hands animation over to production: as video, as a playback file such as Lottie, as code, or as an interactive runtime file.
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