Check out the work of our new in-house graphics designers.

Tricastmedia’s website new front page…

We are pretty excited about Tricast Mail 2.0 - after all, its the accumulation of all we did in the last 6 months (and counting). As it should be, for a major release, there is a major overhaul of the GUI (going to be written using our TWUIK UI engine or otherwise known as Project OMEGA) - without changing our original goals: Tricast Mail is easy-to-use and standards-based. Check back a little while for update on Tricast Mail v2.0.

Mika has posted a well-researched and insightful comparison about FlurryMail and us that captures well our raison d’etre. This first review must be ranked as one of the best, no-fluff, no hype analysis of what the real experience is like when you actually get to use the software. We think it is high time people know the difference.

The much-publicized speedy mail download feature on their website is kinda’ mis-leading. We used it on our 2.5G phone and found that the speed is actually not any better than our phone’s native built-in mail client. This is kinda disappointing considering that FlurryMail’s solution goes through their mail gateway to retrieve mail (i.e. the FlurryMail client does not connect directly to your mail server), you would have expected the optimisation and performance improvement in downloading mail content. In fact, we think Movamail and Tricast Mail do it so much faster and quicker. Tricast Mail (latest version 1.3) has developed a unique network caching technique to speed up mail download which we think by far is the quickest of all the mail clients we have tested. Watch this space for Movamail and Tricast Mail reviews…

Don’t trust our words, go see it for yourself, there is even a video capture of the software running on a Samsung D800.

Click on the video above to read the scoop on FlurryMail.

See pic below of Tricast Mail v1.3 running on PALM TREO 650.

What’s new in Tricast Mail v1.3

• Partial mail download (Download only header or download header + mail body)
• Speed improvement in mail download by up to 150%
• Network caching
• RSS Newsfeed
• Check Update
• Bug fixes and UI enhancements

Yes, we hear you. Many of our users have requested for Tricast Mail to run on PALM ever-popular TREO 650. We like to share this piece of great news with you. We are done. An initial beta version of Tricast Mail for PALM TREO 650 is available now and undergone testing at the moment.

After TREO, you can expect Windows Mobile PPC, RIM Blackberry to follow suit.

Watch this space for new development, it should be released end of this week.

Calling all Tricast Mail registered customer. If you have purchased the software in the last 6 months, you are entitled to the greatest and latest features in v1.3 of Tricast Mail. This is a major upgrade and bug fix.

New Features

• Partial Download
• RSS NewsFeed
• Send to Friend feature

Bug Fixes & Enhancement

• Remove prompting user to save attachment when opening an email that contains doc
• Remove Main Menu screen so when user clicks on his mailbox account, he/she jumps directly to the mail account view
• Include email account information in mail preview
• Rich text widget fix to support more telephone no. pattern
• 150% speed improvement in download mails

Today is one of our team members’ birthday. The team bought a cake for him. It was good to see everyone in high spirits, and a chance for us to sneak out of our busy schedule to get together.

Cakes, Fries, KFC, MacDonalds…

Tonight, we would be releasing Tricast Mail for the following phone models. This is our continuing effort to ramp up the list of devices that would run Tricast Mail to 100 by end of the year. Similarly on ALWAYSSEND.COM, our free mobile mail service, we would also include these devices
New devices added:

• Motorola PEBL U6, SLVR L7
• Nokia 6230i, 6270, 6280, 6681, 6682

In TWUIK, we provide visual eye-candies called “widgets”. Widgets are individual UI component that can be positioned anywhere on the screen. Examples of widget we already built in TWUIK are :-

• Ticker: A widget for displaying single or multiple line text
• ImageBox: A widget for displaying a collection of images and transition effects can be applied when navigating from one image to another
• SlideList
• ArticleList
• Weather
• Clock
• RSS newsfeed
• Stock Quote

See below an example of a clock widget created by extending TWUIK Widget framework, and guess what, it doesn’t take you more than 10 lines of code to do that.

Extending TWUIK to create your own little clock widget!

In TWUIK, we offer developers information dialogs that provide information on screen, and also the ability to set the transparency - we called these UI components “popups”. Popups are similar to J2ME ALERT component, but instead of occupying the whole screen like J2ME ALERT, TWUIK’s Popups display information to users as a transparent layer on the same screen without having to navigate to another screen. And TWUIK’s Popups have more features, for example, you can even request information from user input by embedding our text input entry widget in the Popup, as shown below.

An information popup requesting for user input. Notice that we have our own little text input entry widget.

Tricast Mail Ad on this issue of Total MOBILE (Issue #147). We continue to gather momentum. Our community site (www.alwayssend.com) which offers a LITE version of Tricast Mail has just hit past our second target milestone. And online sales is also picking up. All is looking good. We thank you ALL those out there who have bought our software and emailed us that they like it. It’s a fantastic feeling beyond description… it’s like in cloud nine. Keep the comments coming…

Back cover of Total Mobile

Front page

p.s: Mika, thanks for the pics.

We were mentioned as one of the top 10 j2me mobile app/technology by Wendong’s Smartphone Blog. Thank you… this is comforting to know that people like what we do, it is flattery… it really makes our day…

We are not building rocket science here. What we are trying to achieve is to make GUI development on J2ME easier and allow them to create intuitive applications that rivals Macromedia’s FLASH. It is high time J2ME developers be given a rich GUI toolkit to create FLASH-like animation and advanced UI with a feature-rich API for developing frontends for their application.

Watch this space, we’d be announcing commercial availability very soon.

Source: http://wendong.ngphone.com/?p=257
We are listed as no. 4, flattering… really…

Yesterday, we increased the no. of phones supported for Tricast Mail to 26, adding Nokia E61, Sony Ericsson M600 (yeah… it’s the new UIQ phone), and Samsung 3G babe Z540, increasing the total no. of phones that run Tricast Mail to 26. For those users who have mailed us about support for their phones not listed in our website, fret not… another 10 more models would be launched this month.

When we list a new phone model on our website, much work has been done to make this happened. First, the model has to be thoroughly tested by our group of test engineers in UK. And our subsidiary site in Pakistan then took over using well-equipped test facility to simulate all kinda network and device testings. This is a labourious task but something we are very proud of, as we strive to increase our number of supported phones to 100 by end of the year.

Nokia E61 running Tricast Mail…. the keypad really makes the difference.