Hey, take it to the next level by switching forms with application
buttons! (Just be careful, you can blow the top off your event loop
if you don't do the necessary cleanup/or allow the loop to process
all the events being sent down to it). Just remember to tell people
that your program does that...it's frustrating when you're in one app,
you need to get to your address book...you hit the address book button
and "suprise!" you're now in another form within the same app, and your
user is forced to hit the application launcher icon, then press the
address book button.
The problem is still that you're working with a very small screen,
and if you're opening other people's apps (like a launcher does), you
better make sure to give their forms the proper screen space, or you'll
have some pretty disgruntled customers and other developers. To make
the tabs large enough to use without a stylus (not to mention stacked
tabs!) you'll have to take up a good 25X160 pixel rectangle. That's a
big cut into your screen space...now imagine that you need to make those
tabs about 25X25 pixels, and now lie them across a form. You'll be able
to fit about 6 of them, side by side, in a 150 pixel space (with 5 pixels
on each side left over and used to keep your tabs from looking crowded).
Now, you've got 7 tabs. Uh oh, now you have to either make them smaller,
and harder to use for people with larger fingers, or lie another row
across the screen. Now you're taking up about 50X160, which is almost
1/3 of the screen. How much further can you go before you use up what
little screen real estate you have? Well, you can split up the forms
into more forms, and put more tabs. Okay, now you have 12 tabs. Guess
what? Now that your app is becoming more split apart, it's getting more
of a pain, since your user is jumping back and forth between tabs, checking
forms that at one time were conjoined, but are now in different places.
ARRGH! (Hopefully you won't need to split the forms up again...or you're
going to have to add yet ANOTHER layer of tabs on, thus reducing your
screen space even further for the information that actually matters!)
For a launcher, there's nothing simpler, easier, and more efficient than
a list of buttons. Since the OS is already single-threaded, it's not
like you can do one thing in one tab, then switch over and do something
else in another while you're still processing the application switched to
by the previous tab. Tabs on the Palm are only for looks, they wouldn't
accomplish much more than real buttons. Besides, to make them, you'd need
to make graphic buttons already, so really, all you're doing is making
buttons that LOOK like tabs. So basically, having a Graphics Tab control
is redundant, and just more OS fodder.
-Rus (who's feeling long winded today)
>I also want Graphics Tab control. You know popular launcher
>apps. for palm?
>So...
>It is also usefull when you implement UI taping by hand
>without stilus for
>instance.
>
>Zoran.
--
For information on using the Palm Developer Forums, or to unsubscribe, please see
http://www.palmos.com/dev/tech/support/forums/
