Yes… we are the new micro MNCs… we added another office to our list, this time in Lahore, Pakistan. The office has beefed up its presence significantly and is one of our key development centers, the other being Singapore which we had a couple of guys working on AI-related consumer mobile apps.

We were there last week, visiting some customers and telcos, and we must say, we ar most proud of the quality of engineers we are able to attract, especially in J2EE server side and BREW skillsets. They would be most valuable to our continuing effect to beef up our products and technologies to support other platforms other than J2ME.

Team gathered for a briefing on e-government projects

Vacant office for Ihsan, Salman?

Well-equipped meeting room

End of meeting? I bet all can’t wait…

Spanking new offices, new hires… we are the new “micro MNC”…

Within TWUIK’s rich set of widgets and UI components, there is a class of UI widgets called “Popups“. Popups are basically any window or frame that you overlay on top of your UI. Example of uses include showing alert boxes, dialogs, etc. TWUIK’s Popups can be made transparent and can also assume any of the motion effects or animation engine (via the TINY FX engine, a core component in TWUIK that handles transition, motion effects, transformation, and animation).

Transparency applied on a TWUIK Message Dialog (left image). Another Input Dialog Popup (right image), this time with TWUIK’s own text input entry widget

In addition Popups can be applied with TINY FX effects to create different kinds of animation on how the Popups appear and disappear from the screen. Click on the image below to see the video.

Click image above to bring up the video…

TWUIK Popups running on handset - a Sony Ericsson K750i

TINY FX is essentially a collection of visual effect libraries that provides many kinds and variations of effects on any TWUIK UI components or widgets. TINY FX consists of the following effects engine, namely…

• TransitionFX: For screen transition effects
• MotionFX: For changing a component’s position around the screen in a defined manner
• TransformFX: For resizing, rotating an image or an animation frame of a component.

These 3 effects form the bulk of the animation and dynamic user interface that you can include in your midlet application, making UI for midlets not just canvas, menus or tabs… but a whole slew of possibilities is made possible for developers to create user interface that you only typically find in a Flash application. See an example of a e-zine midlet done using some of TINY FX libraries here.

We are wrapping up OMEGA, the project codename for our lightweight J2ME GUI Toolkit named TWUIK, that allows midlet developers to create nice and professional looking GUI for j2me apps that rival Macromedia FLASH LITE. If you have tracked some of our past announcements on “OMEGA”, you would have seen some of the sample applications that we have created using TWUIK libraries. Many have asked if those midlets were created with FLASH-LITE, the answer is no. We don’t champion Macromedia here, what we are trying to do with TWUIK is to provide midlet developers with a quick and easy programming toolkit to create FLASH-LIKE animations, motion effects, visually appealing GUI, all without having to code a single line of Actionscript. If you know how to program in Java, you would have no problem with using TWUIK. In essence, TWUIK takes the pain out of programming midlets, allowing you to concentrate more on your application functions and logics rather than create your own custom UI components to beef up your GUI.

TWUIK is now scheduled for a August ‘06 release. We are opened to organisations, individual developers, telcos, platform vendors, handset manufacturers who would like to license this GUI toolkit for your product development needs.

Here, these are 2 logos we have shortlisted to use for TWUIK. Tell us what you think.

TWUIK Logo #1

TWUIK Logo #2

We are currently working on porting Tricast Mail for the Nokia E61 device, after receiving numerous requests from the users to support this phone. We have ported it today, without a hitch, just that some keys need to be re-mapped because this device comes with an integrated keypad.

This is also the first device in our list of supported phones that come with a keypad. We used that with Tricast Mail and finds it very useful for typing long mail.

Tricast Mail now on Nokia E61

Besides Nokia E61, a list of other new devices would be released on the 31st July ‘06.

• Nokia E61
• Nokia 6280
• LG Chocolate KG800
• Samsung Z540
• Samsung E900
• Samsund D800
• Sony Ericsson M600i
• Sony Ericsson V630i
• Sony Ericsson K800i
• Sony Ericsson w700i

Also on Blackberry porting, 7130 would be the first version to be released next month.

Friday 6th July ”06 is the release date for v1.2 of Tricast Mail, both on our website and our free mobile mail site www.alwayssend.com. Besides version upgrade, we are also introducing few new features.

• Refer-a-Friend: Now you can refer a friend to download AlwaysSEND mail client by sending SMS, and get the software from our WAP site.
• Faster animated auto-hide menu
• Attachment popup menu: You can now access/open/save attachment via a popup balloon
• Partial download of mail messages during synchronisation and retrieval saves bandwidth usage (available for POP3 for now, IMAP4 would be ready next week) and speed up opening of mail message
• Update feature: Check update of software from our License Server and download latest patches, version upgrades, etc

Some notable v1.2 Fixes

• Removes excess threading to improve overall UI animation and performance
• Icon resized for new Series 60 Nokia phones - E61, N80, N90
• Performance improvement for Motorola v3, v3x

We’ve been working hard over the past weeks to revamp our FREE mobile mail service website AlwaysSEND.COM, and it is now ready. With the new website, we hope it is easier to use AlwaysSEND webmail on your desktop. At the same time, the mobile AlwaysSEND mail software that comes FREE with your AlwaysSEND account has also been enhanced with some nice features such as attachment handling, fixes animation engine to provide a smoother and quicker navigation especially the popup menu.

AlwaysSEND.COM new look!