Developing Software for Symbian OS: A Beginner's Guide to Creating Symbian OS v9 Smartphone Applications in C++

Chapter 12. GUI Application Programming

Smartphones are capable of running complex and powerful applications, but due to the smartphone's small size, it can be challenging to make these applications intuitive and easy to use. Symbian OS addresses this well by providing a full-featured graphical user interface (GUI) environment especially suited for the hardware characteristics of smartphone devices.

To take full advantage of the GUI environment, your application's interface should be consistent with those of other applications, so that smartphone users do not get confused – yet it should also creatively provide good presentation and user control of the features unique to your application. UI style guides exist for both UIQ and S60 and are invaluable sources of information about what can and what cannot be done on each UI, so that your application has a consistent interface suited for that platform. The UI style guides for UIQ and S60 are available on the developer sites (http://www.developer.uiq.com for UIQ and http://www.forum.nokia.com for S60). Up-to-date links to these, and other links referenced in this book, will be kept in the Symbian Developer Network wiki (http://developer.symbian.com/wiki/).

Your program's GUI is its front to the world, and creating a good one can greatly enhance, if not totally determine, the success of your smartphone application.

This chapter covers Symbian OS GUI programming for the two major UI platforms that use Symbian OS v9. First, there is a discussion ...