Palm OS Programming, 2nd Edition

Chapter 4. Tutorial

You have learned all about development environments, design issues, and the Palm platform and now it’s time to put all that knowledge to work. With our help, you are going to create, build, and download a simple Palm OS application. The good and bad news is that we are going to walk you through this process step by step. It’s good news because a good programmer, new to the platform, can often use just this type of help. It’s bad news because it involves telling you how to use a bunch of different tools and development environments that have their own release cycles that will most likely be obsolete within six months.

The software tools discussed here are those current as of mid-2001. Each discussion of a tool will include its version number. As newer versions of tools are made and installation procedures change, we’ll update the relevant sections of this chapter online.

Thus, the first thing you should do before reading the printed version of this chapter is to go to our web site ( http://www.calliopeinc.com/palmprog2/) to see whether there are newer instructions.

There are two things you need to do in this chapter:

1. Read about how to install and run the Palm OS Emulator (POSE) and how to run your application on it.

2. Choose an environment and read our tutorial for it. The two development environments you can choose between are CodeWarrior and PRC-Tools. Read the material in that tutorial and feel free to ignore the other. Each tells you how to:

   • Build an executable Palm application (a PRC file)

   • Make changes to the application (in both the source code and the resources)

   • Rebuild the application

The development platforms that are covered in our discussion of POSE and each tutorial are shown in Table 4-1.

Table 4-1. Development tools and platforms

	Windows 95/NT	Mac OS	Unix
POSE
CodeWarrior
PRC-Tools		(Mac OS X)

We will always cover each platform in the following order: Windows, Mac OS, and Unix. This chapter won’t cover how to use the debuggers from these environments; that’s covered in Chapter 7.