A new look&feel skin has been included in TWUIK Rich Media Engine, we call it BasicGraph. Why the naming? Coz we have optimized the graphics painting and drawing to make it faster to render even on very low-end phones. To skin a TWUIK-enabled application is easy, you just need to change the color values via the API or via a property resource file, at runtime or compile time. This feature allows developers to personalise their midlets and if you are the adventurous type, you could even create your own skin and include it in your applications.

Posted the video on YouTube. Click on image below to watch video.

TWUIK FORMS - the foundation UI for your midlet development

We have added a YouTube widget box of all our past video postings, navigate to the right sidebar and you would see a Video widget box showing all our YouTube postings.

Just posted on YouTube. Click on image below to watch video of Active IDLE demo built using TWUIK.

Konfabulator-like widget on mobile - done using TWUIK…

We added more devices… there are now a total of 43 devices running Tricast Mail. At the rate we are porting, we would soon be hitting 100 models by year end. That’s our goal.

Tricast Mail - the all-powerful J2ME mail client

All 43 models… that can run Tricast Mail, including new models such as Sony Ericsson M600, W950, P990…

Notable new features in v1.4 of Tricast Mail (Standard)…

• Partial Download - Speeds up downloading of mail. All mails can be partially downloaded to save time later when reading the mail content. If upon reading the “partial” mail, and the content interests you, you can opt to download the full mail. This dramatically reduces cost because you can choose to download only what you want to read, on-demand.
• Network caching - Speeds up network connection by more than 150%. Now it is faster to connect to mail servers and retrieving your emails. All these done without using proxy or gateways. Tricast Mail is a proxy-less solution.
• Hotmail/Yahoo native support (Preview) - Simply enter your Hotmail or Yahoo mail account details (login + password) and Tricast Mail will connect to your webmail servers and retrieve your mails. No complicated setup required, just your login and password. Email should be made this easy.
• RSS news reader - Get news on the go… pre-configured news header from BBC, CNN, and some popular feeds means you always stay in touch with the latest happenings around the world.

We have officially launched TWUIK, a platform-independent graphics engine specially tailored for presenting user interfaces. Our platform is designed to address user demand for great graphics, animations, and transitions. Check out the product page for information. Click here.

TWUIK’s modular architecture allows developers to pick and choose components to build mobile applications; SDK can be made available as LITE and STANDARD version across a plethora of devices.

TWUIK Architecture

In addition to providing fast, high quality-graphics rendering, TWUIK™ also features many advanced graphics operations never before seen on portable devices. The wide range of capabilities with TWUIK™ enables phone manufacturers to create truly unique user interfaces.

Video posting of  Active  IDLE, the demo application we built to  showcase the power of TWUIK would be up on this site  later today. Watch this space.

In the meantime, mika posted a nice slideshow on Active IDLE screenshots.

TWUIK has skinning and theme-ing feature, that means, you can create TWUIK apps and change the look and feel or “skin” on the fly. We have optimised this theme-ing feature to make it light weight and fast and ceated the Basic Graph “theme” - the result is shown below - various kinda pre-build skins included.

“Basic” Look and Feel

Another skin - Black…

TWUIK’s new Basic Graph Look and Feel - Faster, Better, Lighter… You can also change the color theme via the API provided if you like.

p/s: Click on image above to see enlarged version.

Ever want to know how to create Yahoo! Konfabulator kinda widgets on your mobile, like Mac’s widgets and Yahoo! desktop widgets and bring life and add a little animation and great effects to your mobile applications with fun, stylish, and useful “TWUIK Widgets“.

TWUIK (see the videos we posted on YouTube), as you probably know by now, provides a complete GUI toolkit for you to create very animated, powerful, and compelling applications on mobile. One of our customers called it “FLASH-LITE on Mobile but done in the J2ME way”…

TWUIK has added a new feature called “TWUIK widgets” where you can take your pick and choose any of the pre-built components such as weather, time zones/clock, calendar, RSS newsfeed, GOOGLE maps, FlickR album viewer, to add to your mobile applications, all without much coding. You can then customise the look by changing the graphics, or you can even create and develop your very own widgets using the TWUIK Widgets Engine API. So anybody who knows Java can easily create that “widgets” on mobile.

In addition to showing the widgets, the display and presentation of these widgets on the mobile screen include transition, animation and motion effects, e.g. when you click on the clock face, it popups a little box showing the current time zone information, and you can also scroll through the various time zones using the 5-directional thumb wheel on your mobile phone. And simply clicking again on the clock widget, the earlier popup box will then fade in. This shows the power of TWUIK, any UI components you create and layout on the screen can be animated and applied motion effects to make it “lively” using our physics motion engine embedded inside TWUIK.

A picture speaks a thousand words… Now, let’s see some screenshots… And to show you what we mean, we’d post videos of the following demo app in our next posting.

Click on above image to see original size.

Watch for cool happenings, teasers of things to come, technical posts on TWUIK, design rants and ramblings, and just about anything else we can think of that seems remotely related to what we do here at Tricastmedia.

We often get requests from customers wanting to try out TWUIK apps and Tricast Mail. Fret not, we have come out with a solution for you to test out our software. We just signed up an online service which allows us to tap on their extensive wide coverage of 10+ global carriers, and 200+ handsets (yes, these are not emulators, these are actual handsets hosted in their server farm) and we upload our JARs so you can try it out and see TWUIK and Tricast Mail running LIVE on carrier networks. This is far better than offering you the JAR directly for you to try on your phone, we think.

Yes, we are releasing v1.4 of Tricast Mail today to offer you a preview of our Yahoo! and Hotmail features. This is not done via POP3, you do not have to enable POP3 on your webmail account. If you have a Hotmail or Yahoo! mail account, simply enter your login details (e.g. login: abc@yahoo.com; password: xxx) via the Settings Screen and nothing else… Tricast Mail will then connect to your Yahoo! mail and Hotmail account to access your mailbox. Simple and easy.

All in one mail client - Tricast Mail is the only mail software you need on your mobile phone…

phew… it was a great show for us. The show generated fantastic response about TWUIK and Tricast Mail. Lotsa interests coming from Content players. And we are on the verge of signing another 2 customers for TWUIK. What a way to mark the launch of TWUIK.

In the meantime, we are revamping this site to include TWUIK product info page, yes, for those of you who emailed us enquiring about TWUIK, the product information would be available online soon. Our resident Graphics Designer is doing the final touch up to the page. So please bear with us while we put up the TWUIK product page.

And some photos from the CTIA show..

Tricastmedia @ CTIA, Los Angeles Sep ‘06

We have been swamped with work for the past week… all the work’s going into preparing for our big show at CTIA in Los Angeles next week. You can find us at booth 664. If you are going to be there, come see us. At the CTIA show, we would be launching TWUIK, our UI technology and platform for building interactive rich apps on java phones.

In addition, we would be releasing the latest version of Tricast Mail with the following new features…

• Hotmail
• PUSH
• RSS reader
• Enhanced Mail Retrieval (Fastest mail client running on a java handset)
• Supports 43 handsets now.

Come see us at the show, and get to experience email on the go… the seamless, hassle-free, consumer-friendly way. Tricast Mail is email made easy. For the lucky few, you can also participate in our lucky draw and stand a chance to win a Nokia E61 loaded with Tricast Mail.

New batch of devices for Tricast Mail to be added this week…

• Nokia 6280
• Nokia N73
• Sony Ericsson P990
• Sony Ericsson w950
• Sony Ericsson K800
• Samsung D900
• Samsung E900

We are pleased to announce that after weeks of development, fine-tuning and optimisation, we are ready to release an enhanced version of our flagship Tricast Mail product -> version 1.5. This release will include an optimised version of our mail fetch algorithm. The early benchmark shows very promising results… on a 3G device, we are able to retrieve an average 250 emails in under a minute. Yes 250 email! And on a 2.5G device, average retrieval is 100-120 emails in 1 minute. We would be posting some videos to show the speed improvement here in this blog.

For existing customers, you would receive a notification for updates next week. Version 1.5 would be released next Friday, in time for our participation at CTIA, in Los Angeles. We would also be announcing the launch of TWUIK - our unique J2ME UI engine, supported by a plethora of 20+ devices and showcasing 4 demo apps - Active IDLE, Photo Blog, E-Zine and Media Player, all powered by TWUIK UI library. Come visit our booth and see the difference.