Palm Programming: The Developer's Guide

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 the Palm Computing web site, http://www.palm.com/devzone) and know where to find things in it. Before showing you how to create an application, we also spend some time explaining the difference between a good application and a bad one; in other words, we tell you how to design for this platform.

The Breakdown of the Chapters

Part I, gives you the big picture. You learn about the devices, their history, their 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 Computing platform telling you about it? We also describe which features can be found on which devices and what you can expect to see in the future.

Chapter 2

Here we show you the choices in development environments and the range of languages you can use.

Chapter 3

We ruminate about the best way to design a Palm application and offer you some advice. We end this chapter by showing you the design of an application and its accompanying conduit that we are going to create in the book.

Part II, takes you inside a Palm application. We describe its structure, user interface elements, and the Application Programming Interface (API) for the various parts of the application.

Chapter 4

We take you through the whole cycle ...