Lyte Blog

Its time to bring you a brand new version of LyteRAD and LyteMobile. As always there are lots of improvements and new features. Check out the announcement here.

Meanwhile hold your breathe for the new revamped LyteMobile announcement tomorrow.

We're all set to give your Lytemobile 2.1 RC1, Hordes of new features will keep you busy exploring the product for days. Introducing the all new Kaos based look and feel, check the screenshots here. In-Phone camera support for image capture, access to solution gallery from the phone itself. Most importantly Lytemobile will now be shipped as Lytemobile CE and LyteMobile Pro. The CE edition is a fully functional free edition, with a restriction of 100 records. The pro edition is unlimted and provides access to the solution gallery. Check the sneak preview and demo here.

When browsing large amount of information you could end up spending lot of time in locating the last record you were viewing or comparing records. The new enhanced spreadsheet view now supports marking rows for easy visual identification. When you come across a record of interest, right click on it and select as mark, This information is only a visual cue and will not affect the record or table information.The marked rows will be remembered even after applying filters and running queries.

Mobile UI design in J2ME


LyteMobile development has pushed us into exploring mobile UI design beyond functional and usable interfaces. The first thing that will strike you is the J2ME does not have a robust and complete UI library like swing. Simple things like setting the background color needs you to use a low level component called the canvas. Which is like a whiteboard where you have to draw and render every little thing from pictures to text and then handle user input your self. This is a great concept to maintain portability across mobile platforms but a major pain for development. Specially due to the fact that todays mobile devices are far more powerful since the days of J2ME specs, ask for any fancy UI feature and you're on your own. J2ME has decided to leave you high an dry.

Then next thing we did was check various third party libraries and only 2 are worth any mention. J2ME Polish and kuix. Both provde customizable UI components right from the theme to maintaining portability. But before you go ahead and jump into these toolkits, check their licensing terms. They are priced ridiculously, especially when you consider selling your J2ME apps for a few dollars, and add to that their 'strait jacket' style licensing terms for commercial use and you would be better off not using it, unless you're building a GPL product.

Rub us on the wrong side and we get all worked up. So we decided to build our own J2ME UI layer.

Introducing kAOS

kAOS is an answer to the lack of customizable UI components in J2ME. The toolkit comes with familiar swing style components like KList, KTable and KTree. All of them are completely customizable to the extent of calling it skinnable. Mobile devices being very pesonal gadgets, on of the first things that a user likes to see in a mobile application is visual appeal, and Kaos provides that bang for your application. kAOS will soon be available as a product but witout the ridiculous licensing terms and prices of other UI toolkits.

Meanwhile you can enjoy using LyteMobile which will soon be kAOS powered. Here are a couple of screens, the first 2 on the left are default J2ME look and feel and the two on the right are rendered using kAOS.

To kick off LyteRAD 2.1, we are having a contest. We want you to build any application using LyteRAD CE/Pro and you could win a LifeTime subscription of LyteRAD Pro. So what does that give you, you will get a copy of LyteRAD Pro that is released everytime forever. So all you have to do is fire up LyteRAD 2.1, build anything and submit it. You get to keep the application, we will only use it to showcase LyteRAD and Your creative abilities. So go ahead grab a copy of LyteRAD CE Its free! and build something and you could be our "MasterBuilder".

How do you submit?, simple, goto tools and settings in LyteRAD home and build a distributable.

Submit your distributable and any screenshots to contest at lytecube dot com, With your name, email, and a short description of what is the application. Thats it! We'll choose the best application, the one that pushes lyteRAD to its limits.

Hurry contest is open till August 15th only!.

Watch the promotional video on youtube

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As a thank you note to all our current subscribers, we are offering a once in a lifetime ridiculous discount on LyteRAD Pro 2.1 only if you're already on our mailing list. Do not forget to check your mailbox, if you happened to delete your email, you can contact us at support@lytecube.com and we will send you the mail again.