Development

That’s right! This is a unique opportunity to try out three Live Wallpapers from TAT. Normally, TAT only creates these kinds of wallpapers for device manufacturers and network operators. Now we’re releasing three TAT-designed, interactive wallpapers for free, to show off some of the cool things we can do with our powerful TAT Cascades™ UI framework. Our three promotional wallpapers are:

Artemia: a soothing, yet spectacular undersea wallpaper
Artemia is the beautiful home of glowing creatures. Poke them to make them swim a bit faster or tap on the water to see bubbles. Try catching a glimpse of the largest creature in the ocean! Artemia changes dynamically throughout the day, and it even responds when you charge your Android device.

Blue Range: a fun, isometric and living landscape
This fun loving live wallpaper is full of animals with great personalities. Poke them and see what happens! You can affect land elevation and tilt trees and flowers by moving the phone. Watch darkness fall during the nighttime and don’t miss the cool sunbeam effect while charging your device…

Retro Pixels: a game-like wallpaper with old school aesthetics
Explore a retro-style pixelated world. Flowers bloom when you receive text messages and calls, leaves fall when you shake the phone, and at night the moon rises. This wallpaper also has four hidden secrets. Will you be able to find them all? And can you really trust the duck?

Check out the trailer below, then go get the live wallpapers for free from Android Market!

Artemia QR code or download directly from your Android phone
Artemia needs access to the accelerometer.
The world in Artemia will rotate when the device is tilted. Bubbles will appear when the device is shaken.

Blue Range QR code or download directly from your Android phone
Blue Range needs access to the accelerometer.
The trees in Blue Range will lean with the device when tilted.

Retro Pixels QR code or download directly from your Android phone
Retro Pixels needs access to sms/contact data and accelerometer.
The flowers in Retro Pixels will bloom when texts and calls are received. Leaves will fall off the tree when the device is shaken.

Supported Devices
Samsung Galaxy S
HTC Desire
HTC Nexus One
Motorola Milestone/Droid

Yesterday, our own Martin “Irish” Eriksson held a highly appreciated lecture at The Game Assembly, a game production school right here in Malmö. He talked about how we develop our products using agile teams and automated testing.

The TAT Cascades Product Suite keeps improving! Version 3.8 adds major features such as Cascades Monitor and Motion Lab split view editing. We have also been working closely with our customers and made adjustments to make sure that the features of Cascades better meet the needs of their particular UI projects. The release includes upgrades to TAT Cascades, TAT Kastor, TAT Motion Lab and TAT Cascades for Android.

Cascades Monitor

Cascades Monitor is a new tool for identifying and analyzing performance bottlenecks in your Cascades applications. As you run your application on the device, performance and TML profiling data is being fed back to your computer. This allows you to verify that things are running smoothly on the target device from the very start of the project.
New APIs have been added for inserting custom measuring points, showing how much time is spent in Cascades code, in the integration layer, and in application code.

Motion Lab split view and greatly improved visual editing

TAT Motion Lab – the Cascades desktop development tool – has been upgraded with split view, making it possible to edit your code in text and visual mode side-by-side. Motion Lab is now also running the entire Cascades project in the visual editor, allowing editing of visuals as they would appear on the device, and improved data binding resolving.

Improvements & bugfixes

TAT Cascades version 3.8 includes a number of highlights such as drag-and-drop support in TreeLists, Custom Layouts, Application Contexts, and even better OpenGL ES Performance.
In addition, have made over 200 improvements, optimizations and bug fixes. If you are a customer, complete release notes are available on the TAT developer site.

TAT has released new powerful versions of TAT Cascades and TAT Kastor. Make sure to explore the new drag-and-drop framework, the extended TML Templates and Example suites, as well as an improved TreeList. An overview of the main highlights in the new release can be found below:

New Drag and Drop Framework
In Cascades 3.7 Drag and Drop has been reworked in order to make it easier to create user interface scenarios involving Drag and Drop. It enables the application programmer to start a drag-and-drop session from any pointer event, something that was previously impossible. It also eliminates the need for C code when deciding when and where a control can get dragged and dropped. This logic has now been moved to TML and is fully configurable. The new Drag and Drop solution also uses simpler TML without any pre-determined animation triggers, and there is no longer any need for drag-and-drop transitions.

TML Templates
TML Templates lets you compose your own group of TML elements that can be reused in other contexts of your application code. In this way you can create components that can be utilized by yourself and other developers in your team. TML Templates are defined and used in TML, without the use of C code.

New Example Suite
The Example Suite has been updated with a new set of examples to help simplify the development process with Cascades. The suite includes simple getting started examples as well as more complex UI components for advanced interfaces.
Sporting a new stylish look and feel, the design is fully touch optimized and follows modern UI paradigms.

TreeList improvements
The TreeList control and its associated visuals have been extended with new functionality, in many cases making it a viable replacement for the old list framework. Two new layouts have been added: FlexiLayout and TabLayout.
The FlexiLayout makes it possible to create very diverse layouts and can be seen as a replacement for the free-form list. The TabLayout groups header items together and shows the children of the last expanded header item.
New TML and C APIs have been added, extending among other things scrolling and focus handling.

Using TAT Cascades for Android, Fredrik Berglund shows how easy it is to build an attractive coverflow UI on Android in just five minutes, and have it running on a device.

NOTE: Programming section is five minutes, but fast forwarded to 3 minutes

With TAT Cascades for Android and TAT Motion Lab, Fredrik has a really flexible toolset that allows him to check performance directly on target, change design direction at anytime and create a prototype that shows a UI concept with great performance. Working with TAT Cascades makes it possible to actually sketch on device.

Why create a concept movie when you can create a working prototype in the same amount of time?

Did you know this about TAT Cascades for Android?

• TAT Cascades enables the Android framework to be a modern architecture not only to come on par with today’s high end UI’s but also to go beyond.

• TAT Cascades provides next generation UI driven approach rather than the programmatic UI in Android

Benefits:
• CTS compliant pre-integration on Android
• Using hardware acceleration to its full extent
• Bleeding-edge user experience, with full support 3D in the UI
• Rapidly scale your Android implementation across other operating systems, such as Windows Mobile, Symbian etc.

Today TAT – The Astonishing Tribe has released new versions of TAT Cascades and TAT Motion Lab. TAT Cascades, the leading user interface framework on the market, has been upgraded with a range of new features and improvements focusing on performance, efficiency and easy customization.

Even higher performance
TAT’s UI Framework is known for its high performance across different platforms and operating systems. Now the performance has been further improved, resulting in increased frame rate and responsiveness, noticeable in common use cases like flick scrolling a list and screen transitions. The 3D capabilities are also improved, with a noticeable difference in rendering quality and frame rate, both using software and GPU based rendering.

Fast device customization
The significance of fast customizations to improve your time-to-market is of critical importance to manufacturers today. In the new release we have therefore extended the possibility to implement the UI flow declaratively in XML, meaning that you can build and customize your UI Flows without the need for coding and compiling C-code, and in effect tailor your devices for different regions, segments or customers in record time.

Rapid prototyping with LUA
TAT Cascades now supports LUA script bindings. Instead of being dependent on a software engineer writing C code behind, the UI developer can now create complex user interfaces just using a combination of XML, XML-operations, and LUA script. As a result, UI developers get a much more efficient prototyping environment.

OpenVG™
TAT Cascades now supports OpenVG acceleration as a complement to software or OpenGL ES based rendering. OpenVG is a standardized cross-platform API that provides a low-level hardware acceleration interface for vector graphics libraries such as Flash and SVG, targeted primarily at handheld devices that require compelling user interfaces and text – while enabling hardware acceleration to provide fluidly interactive performance at very low power levels.

Project efficiency
The ability to run large phone projects is of great importance for overall development efficiency. To help guide developers through the complex structures the UI the new version of TAT Motion Lab includes a project overview that shows a hierarchical view of all UI components. The properties editor has a new intuitive interface and great enhancements have been made to the XML verification capabilities. Developers can also turn on profiling to measure different parameters of the UI like frame rendering time and memory allocations to efficiently optimize the performance.

For more information about our products and the latest release please contact us at info@tat.se or call us at For existing customers we refer to http://developer.tat.se for access to complete release notes.