Kristian Austad wrote: > I noticed Aaron Ardiri made some appearances in the forum recently, > I'm posting this in the hope you might have thoughts to share.
i make the occasional celebrity appearance here and there *joking* but seriously - times have been busy and not so much time for the forums as i used to have :) the old days of posting are way gone. > I think users expect applications to have a webbased interface, > such as hyperlinks. On the Pocket PC, there are APIs that deal > with HTML. On the Palm, the options seem a lot more limited. you can do a number of things; you dont need to specifically be HTML specific. of course; HTML is a standard; but, over the years i have done a number of programs that didn't even render HTML but the user still had this point + click feel: a good example http://www.ardiri.com/index.php?redir=palm&cat=citikey&subcat=search not a single line of HTML there, just carefully placed strings with an event loop that looks for touch sensitive areas and respond appopriately to. you can do this quite easily as well. > I've previously asked and been referred to Plucker. I've had a > look at it and thought it would probably take longer to integrate > the parts I need than to write my own. thats the problem with using a library. it may either provide way too much or, not enough for what you need. rolling your own is an option - or, sticking to basics. > Aaron Ardiris "GotHelp" sample seems to solve this rather > elegantly. But source for it isn't available. this was designed to be simple - and, cover the basic cases. http://www.ardiri.com/index.php?redir=palm&cat=gothelp&subcat=scrnshot is probably the best example that was every publically used. :) but, keep in mind this stuff was written way back in 2000. i should have the code lying around somewhere. contact me offline if you are interested in it. it could be a little messy :P integration is the biggest key; and, you need something simple. even looking at a few examples might give you enough info to write your own little library. > What I've tried to do is to make my own simple hyperlink > handling by using gadgets and APIs. The functionality of this > is limited, slow and sluggish (the HTML text is written to the > display using WinDrawChars). The text really needs to be in > a field to achieve something user friendly. this is pretty much what every other library does :) maybe not using gadgets; but, by drawing text on the display and keeping track of a specific sensitive area that is responded to in the event of a user interaction event. drawing your own renderer also prevents people from being able to highlight and copy - unless, you write support for that. > The strategic question from a developers position: Can > developers expect streamlined HTML rendering and handling > capabilities from future Palm SDKs? probably not. palm has always has the idea that some 3rd party solution will handle it, or, you write it yourself. -- Aaron Ardiri [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.mobilewizardry.com/ -- For information on using the PalmSource Developer Forums, or to unsubscribe, please see http://www.palmos.com/dev/support/forums/
