Palm Programming: The Developer's Guide

General Design of a Palm Application

Most applications will contain a certain core number of user interface elements. Even the simplest application will, at the very least, need a form and some controls. Most applications go well beyond the minimal number of features and have multiple menus, forms, and dialogs as well.

When you sit down to design your application, you’ll need to ask yourself the following questions and come up with some reasonable answers to them:

What tasks does the application accomplish?

Obviously, this is a question one would ask about any application on any platform. That doesn’t make it any less relevant here. You need to lay out as clearly as possible what the user can do with your application, what tasks the user can perform. Just as importantly, you should have a clear idea of possible tasks that the user can’t do.

The essence of the Palm OS and the handhelds is speed and accessibility. Putting a possible feature on the chopping block because it ruins either of these is something to be proud of and is terribly difficult to do in this era of “kitchen sink” applications.

What forms does the application have?

There is minimally a startup form that the user sees when tapping the application icon. Every dialog (other than an alert) or other data view is also a new form. A good rule of thumb is that you will have one form for every view of data. Forms add up fast when you count this way.

What menus does the application have?

Commonly, you will support the Record, ...