Palm OS Programming, 2nd Edition

What This Book Is About and How to Read It

This book shows you how to create a Palm application and a conduit. It assumes that you have the Palm OS documentation (available at http://www.palmos.com/dev) and know where to find things in it. Before showing you how to create an application, we spend some time explaining the development environments, the UI, and what makes for a successful handheld application.

Here is a summary of what we cover:

Part I gives you the big picture. You learn about the handhelds, their history, what makes them great devices, the development environments, and the right way to design a Palm application.

Chapter 1

We happily admit that this chapter is unabashedly partisan. Would you want someone who doesn’t like the Palm OS telling you about it? We also describe what makes this handheld platform successful and the philosophy behind the handheld design. We touch on how these factors, in turn, influence application design.

Chapter 2

We describe the choices in development environments and the range of languages you can use. We cover everything from simple forms-based environments that use languages like Visual Basic to full-blown environments that require C.

Chapter 3

We discuss the use of all of the forms and form objects in the Palm OS. We then venture onto the topic of handheld UI design and philosophy. This includes everything from how the intended audience shapes the content of applications to a careful look at some well-designed forms and dialog ...