Mobile Python: Rapid Prototyping of Applications on the Mobile Platform

4.2. Application Structure

Many S60 applications share the same user interface layout. Take a look at Figure 4.1 or almost any application on your S60 mobile phone, including the PyS60 interpreter and you will notice the same structure in the user interface.

Figure 4-1. A typical user interface (a) structure and (b) screenshot based on the structure

Figure 4.1(a) shows the structure of the S60 user interface. To see how the diagram maps to reality, compare it to Figure 4.1(b), which shows a typical user interface that is built using the S60 UI framework. In the following description, text in parentheses refers to text in the screenshot.

At the top of the screen, you see the application title (Tabs). Below the title, you may see a row of navigation tabs (One and Two). The large area in the middle is the application body which may be used by a number of different UI elements (the list: red, green, blue, brown). Various dialogs, such as popup notes, may appear on the application body, as we saw in Chapter 3.

At the bottom, you see two items that are activated by two dedicated keys, the left and right softkeys, on your mobile phone keyboard. If no dialog is active, the left softkey activates the application menu (Options) and the right softkey quits the running application (Exit). If a dialog is shown, the left softkey corresponds to Accept and the right one to Cancel.

In PyS60, ...