Palm Programming: The Developer's Guide

Chapter 10. Debugging Palm Applications

There are a variety of useful tools to help you debug your Palm application. The best by far is the Palm OS Emulator (POSE). With it you can code, build, and test your handheld application, without ever leaving the comfort of your desktop. Another useful tool is the strategic use of the reset buttons. There are a couple of different forms that we discuss. There are also a number of hidden Graffiti shortcut characters that offer you debugging aids and shortcuts.

Source-level debugging is available for both CodeWarrior and GNU PalmPilot SDK. This goes a long way toward making your debugging job easier. Using the Simulator on Mac OS is also worth a brief discussion for those of you who will work on that platform.

Last, we discuss Gremlins—the useful testing creatures that bear not the slightest resemblance to fanciful beings. Gremlins in the Palm world are little monkeys who bash about randomly on your code looking for problems. You may not like them, but you will find them very helpful for catching bugs you might otherwise have missed.

Using POSE

POSE emulates, at the hardware level, a Palm handheld. It emulates a Motorola Dragonball processor, a display, and so on. Actual Palm OS handhelds also contain ROM—the emulator requires ROM, as well (actually, a file containing a ROM image). POSE can emulate a 1.0, 2.0, or 3.0 OS device, depending on the ROM you provide.

POSE is based on Copilot, an application written by Greg Hewgill. POSE is supported ...