Palm OS Programming, 2nd Edition

Using Simulator on Mac OS

CodeWarrior running on the Mac OS has a feature not found on the Windows version: the Simulator. The Simulator consists of some Mac OS libraries that contain a subset of the Palm OS. When you create a Simulator version of your application, you actually build a Mac OS application that simulates a Palm OS application. It does not simulate the entire Palm OS, only your application. No other applications are present. Figure 7-20 shows a Simulator application running.

Figure 7-20. A simple Palm OS application running as a Simulator application on Mac OS

Back in the dark ages, before POSE was available, the Simulator was an almost indispensable tool. Like POSE, the Simulator doesn’t require a Palm device to be connected. It also allows debugging applications that use serial communications (tough to do if you’re debugging with the device itself and have the one-and-only serial port connected to the debugger).

Now that POSE is available, however, the Simulator is much less useful. In fact, we don’t use it anymore. We can think of only one advantage that the Simulator has compared to POSE: it is faster. On a reasonably fast Mac OS machine, POSE is quick enough, so the speed isn’t much of an issue.