Ting! brings new level of personalisation to your Nokia device

Today, we’ll talk with the developer behind Ting!, an application that brings new level of personalisation to phone calls and SMS messages.

Welcome Dmitriy, please tell us a bit about yourself.

Hi, my name is Dmitriy Tarasov and I am head of Tarasov Mobile Software. 1 year ago I started my career as independent mobile software developer focusing on Symbian OS. I’ve released very popular products Ting!, Blacklist Mobile and Whitelist Mobile. At the moment I work with small group of developers on new cool apps for Nokia devices and I would say that from this point Tarasov Mobile Software becomes a company, not just one developer. It is exciting because I really like what I do, I have ideas and have talented developers around which help me to build new name in mobile software market.

Ting! brings new level of personalization to your Nokia device

The original idea was based on trying to figure out how to add some fun and personalization to daily mobile phone use. Modern Nokia mobile devices have lots of cool features which help users to use any services we can imagine but Nokia devices are naturally mobile phones. Users spend a lot of time calling and sending/receiving SMS. Looking at the same call dialing or message receiving dialog is boring and that’s where Ting! helps Nokia devices to bring some fun to user experience. Ting! allows to add to favorite contacts as many pictures or photos as you like. And it will show them all as very nice slideshow during incoming/outgoing calls and when incoming SMS/MMS arrives. This is not first application of this kind, there were some apps called “fullscreen callers” but Ting! is obviously first and only one which shows slideshows instead of one picture and which works on Symbian^1 devices.

I wouldn’t say that idea of this app changed a lot by this moment. It was pretty much clear for me since the beginning and the most major changes are rather marketing-oriented. But this is another story.

Ting! fully supports S60 3^rd edition and S60 5^th edition (Symbian^1) devices. Couple of days ago I added support of upcoming Nokia N8 device and Symbian^3 in general. So next release available in Ovi Store will support Symiban^3 as well.

The main technology under Ting! is Symbian C++. It was developed using Microsoft Visual Studio.Net+Carbide.VS as well as Carbide.C++. S60 3^rd MR, FP2, S60 5^th SDK’s + some private Nokia APIs were used. I know Nokia aggressively promotes Qt. But as small company we need to sell our apps, not develop for fun. And at this moment only Symbian C++ can bring us access to consumers.

There were some issues with S60 5^th edition devices, but we’ve found the solution. And that was the most fun part because we were very satisfied with the result. It looks really cool. You can check the demonstration of Ting! here:

Discussion boards and Wiki helped us a lot. I would say that it can give you answers for 99% of your questions. Also I would like to thank Alexander Trufanov from Nokia Russia for helping with resolving some technical issues. I don’t really think that success of apps like Blacklist Mobile and Ting! would be possible without using Forum Nokia developer resources.

I believe that Symbian is the most powerful mobile platform in its internals. It allows developers to use system resources very deep and to create very powerful apps. But it is weak in UI layer. Avkon doesn’t satisfy modern User Experience expectations so moving to Qt is very logical and bold move from Nokia. It will cause developer troubles in the beginning, but will bring more users of Nokia devices with upcoming Symbian^4 release.

Yes, next major version of Ting! will have sms preview and cool effects. So it is going to be more beautiful and useful.

APPsolutely, at the moment new cool entertainment app is going under QA. It is called Magic Brush. 2 more products will appear by the end of this summer, so stay tuned.

• Name: Dmitriy Tarasov
• Country: Russia
• Website: http://dtarasov.ru/
• Twitter: TarasovMobile
• Apps: Magic Brush, Ting!, Blacklist Mobile, Whitelist Mobile