LITTLEBLACKDOG.COM

Posted: Fri Feb 21, 2003 8:39 pm Post subject: Palm OS Programming

Well, I finally got a 256 megs memory card for my little Alfred (my Palm m500) and i'm now getting into writing my own little applications.
Anyone here got anylinks to good sites for palm programming?
Programs?
Anything?

Smile

Posted: Fri Feb 21, 2003 9:19 pm Post subject:

You named it?

Posted: Fri Feb 21, 2003 9:39 pm Post subject:

Last time I did PalmOS programming was back in version 3.0. Not a fun OS to program for I'll tell you that much. Don't know how much has changed since. But it was quite uncomfortable working with (if I remember correctly) roughly 96Kbytes of heap memory for your apps. And no filesystem! Persistent data had to be stored in a weird internal database format, and each record only holds 512KB (but you can have as many records as memory on the device allows).

I have the official docs from Palm in windows HTML help (*.chm) file which you could also download from Palm's developer website.

Check out www.falch.net I used their IDE for my projects. It use to be free but then they started charging money, I haven't checked up on them in a while. There's a special version of gcc along with all the needed build tools (linker, res editor, etc.) in one tool chain, but you need cygwin (really just the DLL I think) also available free somewhere. There's plenty of info out there, google search will give you what you need.

Just be ready to manage your memory very carefully. I went nuts with memory access violations. It's just gets tedious because you have to call special API functions to allocate memory and some cases call for certain types of mem alloc functions. Some cases you'd have to allocate a chunk of memory and get a handle to it, lock the handle to get a pointer because string manipulation routines operate on locked pointers only. See how easy it is to get the run around? And this is all done in C. If you use C++ sure you get better memory management like the "new" and "delete" operators, but it also taxes you 8-12 KB of memory (maybe more) for the standard C++ runtime. Memory exceptions almost always lead to a soft reset which gets annoying and makes me uncomfortable everytime I have to do it.

My experience with it was quite painful and I'm just glad my employer liked PocketPCs better and we switched to that platform. It's almost exactly like programming for desktop Windows OSes.

If I haven't scared you off already, great. I suggest you pick up a book on it to help you walk through it. There are a lot of very specific rules that you need to follow in order to get things working properly. Rather than digging thru the official docs, a book usually will point out those rules earlier on. Such things like how to properly use certain controls like a drop down combo box will be covered more clearly in a book than in Palm's manual.

Best of luck to you. Sorry I don't have any code to share.