> two tags have been added being BITMAPCOLOR and BITMAPCOLOUR...
Ok, but to be consistent for the folks who want gray icons, you'd have to
do grEy as well! :-)
> David Fedor: whats the deal with the OS handling more than one
> bitmap at the same time? do they share color tables?
> what algorithms are used to "generate this global"
> color table?
Each depth in a bitmap can have its own color table. But in general, you
really don't want to have a color table in a bitmap if you can help it,
because it dramatically slows down the time to render the image. So please
don't have the default to be to create a color table.
(Why? Because when rendering something with a color table, the system has
to go through each entry in the table and find the closest index in the
destination table. If there weren't any exact matches, and each was a 256
entry table, that'd be 256*256 complex comparisions. Far better, if you've
got an image which needs rendering with a special set of colors, to set the
color table of the destination (usually the screen) to be the appropriate
one for the bitmap, and then draw the bitmap.)
The OS, when it goes to draw a bitmap, will choose the highest depth which
is less than or equal to the destination window's depth. And it is all
backward compatible, so assuming you've got a one-bit depth image in there
the bitmap will render even on a Palm OS 1.0 device.
-David Fedor
Palm Developer Support
