Programming Visual Basic for the Palm OS

Chapter 2. Application Development

Creating Palm applications requires you to consider many different design aspects, as discussed in Chapter 1. The success of your applications, however, will ultimately ride on their usability by the end users, so it is important to understand both the style of a typical Palm application and how to achieve that using Visual Basic and AppForge.

This chapter will explain how to design and develop Palm applications that provide most or all the features common to other Palm applications. The emphasis is on using AppForge ingots to create your user interface and leveraging the libraries provided by AppForge, which give you access to many native Palm functions within Visual Basic. The chapter offers a building block approach, in which we will present several topics and then incorporate them into an application. Where appropriate, we will build on previous examples. However, the goal is to teach you specific concepts and not focus on building a large monolithic application by chapter’s end. It is intended that the source code be generic enough that you can cut and paste code into your applications as you see fit. The source code and compiled versions of all examples presented in this chapter are available for download at http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/vbpropalm/.

User Interface Design

User interface design is one of the most challenging aspects of Palm programming. Creating a usable interface is the key to user acceptance; if an interface is too hard ...