> I believe
>that's why most of the PalmPilot community prefers good 'ol black and
>white--well, at least I do. I still can't see why anyone would want to see
>addresses in colour. This is a handheld meant to deliver information, not a
>Tricorder or Star Trek medical scanner.
Well, I used to believe this too back in the days when I was using a Mac
SE. But the simple fact is that, in almost every application, color CAN
be used to "deliver information". For example, just to use the Address
Book application, it would be possible (I don't believe Palm is going
this route, however) to display "All" names but with the names
color-coded by category, so you could "visually filter" the names without
having to use the category selector.
In our "Athlete's Diary" application, we provide graphs of the amount of
activity in different sports per week. In the current version, if you
graph "All Sports" instead of a single sport, there is just a single bar
indicating total activity. With color, our next version will display a
stacked bar chart, which will convey multiple information simultaneously
- the total length of the bar is the total activity per week, while the
length of each color portion of the bar is the amount of activity in that
sport per week. It's true that you can try to do the same thing (as we
used to do on the Mac) with various "patterns", but it simply isn't the
same to the viewer (and of course patterns wouldn't be applicable at all
in the Address Book example above).
I'm not saying that color is the be-all and end-all of handheld devices,
or that for any particular usage pattern it's the best choice (outdoor
viewability, battery life, etc.), but saying that color can't be an
important tool for delivering information is simply wrong.
Steve Patt
President, Stevens Creek Software
http://www.stevenscreek.com/palm
Best PQA ("ePQA"), PalmSource 99
Best Application ("PizzaScan"), Palm Developer's Conference 1998
First printing software for the Palm - September, 1997
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