AppForge will soon be releasing a new plug-in for Visual Basic that will allow users to more easily develop Palm apps using VB. The apps will require that the AppForge virtual machine about k be installed on the Palm to run. Ingots can be placed onto a form and are specially built to be used in the embedded space.
Every standard Ingot has code that also runs in the AppForge Runtime. The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. PalmInfocenter is not responsible for them in any way. Please Login or register here to add your comments.
Comments Closed This article is no longer accepting new comments. Where the average app is about K. C may not be that hard but why learn another language if you don't have to.
You can also write crappy program in C, you don't just need VB. Its the how the code is written that makes it crappy not the language that is used! Anyone who writes VB apps, already has VB so you can count that cost. Why not wait and see what this product has to offer before bashing it.
I've been using it for over a year now for Palm Development and it's progressed in new capabilities in the past several months. No runtimes needed but this is an option, if you so choose. I'm a long-time VB Programmer 10 years or so. I love VB on the Desktop, but it makes little sense to carry the associated overhead i. With a k runtime library, it's highly unlikely that any truly professional applications would get off the ground with such requirements.
Even with today 8MB machines. However, it's good to have an option when it comes to development tools. Perhaps, someone else won't be turned off my the memory requirements of AppForge.
Although, I have been wrong once before :. However, I think AppForge's target market is companies, not individuals. I'll use mine as an theoretical example. I can see us deciding that our sales force needs more access to company info and deciding that Palms are the best way to go.
We already have a group of VB developers who write apps for internal use. With AppForge, they write a VB app that works with some of those internal apps. The company buys a bunch of Palms and gives them to the sales people with the VB app already on them and trains the salespeople to use it.
There's also live online events, interactive content, certification prep materials, and more. Over the past five years, the Palm PDA has zoomed to prominence as the handheld device of choice for the consumer and the enterprise. From a practical perspective, this means that it is very easy to come up to speed with the AppForge tool.
Developers can focus right away on forms and controls, events and procedures, without learning a new development environment. In this chapter, we take a quick look at what it means to develop software for the Palm handheld device, which is very different from the Windows desktop. We provide an overview of the AppForge product—what it is and how it works. If you are reading this book, the chances are high that you are new to Palm software development or to the AppForge product, or very likely both.
Writing software for embedded devices—such as the Palm, the Pocket PC, or pagers like the RIM Blackberry—was once the exclusive territory of the professional C developer. Every bit was counted, and every screen pixel hoarded. This approach is still important—you simply cannot write software for the handheld market as if it were the Windows desktop.
Microsoft has been trying that for years with dismal results. Consumers and corporate users do not buy handheld devices for the quality of the Web browser; instead, they want focused tools that enhance personal productivity or enable key business processes, and they want applications that run quickly.
Look in a typical PDA, and you will see organizer software, notepad programs, diet and exercise planners, newsreaders, games and entertainment software, stock applications, and so on. In fact, one of the major reasons for the success of the Palm device is its thousands and thousands of quality software products. All these successful applications share at least one common factor: they are focused on providing exactly what the user wants, and little else.
They do not provide a feature list bloated with nice-to-have features; they do provide timely access to information that really matters—a telephone number, a stock quote, a photograph, or directions to the shopping center.
This book cannot tell you which features are critical to your users and your market—only you can do that. This book will, however, show you when and how to use the available Palm features to structure a program that works well on the handheld device. If you are completely new to the Palm, you should stop right now and get a book on using the Palm handheld device. This will give you a better foundation for developing software that fits the Palm device.
There are many important differences between desktop and Palm development that will force you to rethink the way software is engineered and used. There is just no way around the fact that handheld devices are small. The Palm OS currently supports a screen that measures pixels tall by pixels wide.
The majority of Palm devices have monochrome screens that can display four shades of gray, two of which are black and white. That single feature of Word is about pixels wide by pixels tall—over two and a half times the available screen size for an entire Palm application.
Figure shows the listbox with the Palm screen superimposed on it. The Palm device has no keyboard and no mouse—only a stick that functions as both.
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