Palm OS Programming, 2nd Edition

Menu User Interface

Palm application menus should look the same from application to application; they should share a consistent organization and set of menu items. Indeed, some menus, such as the Edit menu, should be identically organized regardless of the application.

Figure 11-1 shows a sample menu bar containing two menus: Customer and Options. The open Customer menu contains two menu items: New Customer and Beam all Customers.

Figure 11-1. Application menu bar, menus, and menu items

Note that menu items commonly have shortcuts associated with them. These are Graffiti letters that are unique to each menu item. By doing the stroke-and-letter shortcut, the user can perform the operation without first selecting the menu item. For example, / N brings up a New Customer form. As a rule, you should add these shortcuts to menu items wherever necessary and always with standard menu items. Make sure that the most frequent operations have shortcuts, and don’t put a shortcut on an infrequent action (such as the About box).

Arranging Menus

Menus can also be arranged with separator bars in them to group similar items together (see Figure 11-2). Note that menus and menu items are never dimmed (grayed out). We discuss how to handle menu items that aren’t applicable in certain situations in Section 11.3.6 later in this chapter.

Standard Menu Items

There are some standards menu items your application ...