Skip to Main Content
Palm OS Programming, 2nd Edition
book

Palm OS Programming, 2nd Edition

by Julie McKeehan, Neil Rhodes
October 2001
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
704 pages
19h 33m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Palm OS Programming, 2nd Edition

The Well-Designed Form

Now that you have seen some examples of the UI objects available on the Palm OS, and seen how the audience of an application can affect its design, it is worthwhile to show you some well-designed and not-so-well-designed forms. We will also point out important placement rules that agree with Palm’s own guidelines along the way.

Here are the important optimization rules to use when designing your forms:

  • The quintessential handheld tasks your application provides should drive the design.

  • Minimize the number of taps and time to complete frequent actions (follow the 80/20 rule).

  • Minimize screen clutter by hiding infrequent actions in menus and other forms.

  • Provide command buttons for common multistep activities.

  • Minimize switching screens for common tasks.

  • Be clever in implementing unique aspects of the application.

In these next sections, we will show you some forms that in some ways follow these placement rules and in some ways that violate them. You should keep these optimization rules in mind as we look at their designs.

The To Do List—A Well-Designed Main Form

We are looking at the To Do list as an example of a well-designed main form of a built-in application (Figure 3-34).

The To Do list

Figure 3-34. The To Do list

Some of the essential features of any main form of an application are:

  • It uses the entire screen or in other words, it is modeless.

  • It has a title (tapping on the ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

Palm OS Network Programming

Palm OS Network Programming

Greg Winton
Palm Programming: The Developer's Guide

Palm Programming: The Developer's Guide

Neil Rhodes, Julie McKeehan

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 1565928563Errata Page