At 12:29 2003-1-9 -0800, you wrote:
I'm relatively new to Palm proramming. I bought an
academic version of Codewarrior v8 about a year ago,
played around with it a little, now I'm finally
getting back to it.

I've already had enough with the various problems with
Constructor (doesn't start, doesn't update files with
the latest changes, etc.), so I'd like to try PilRC,
but I'm a little confused. In the manual, examples,
and related sites I've seen Pilrc, pilrcui, pilrcedit
commands. I see I also need a plugin to get it to work
with CW, but I'm confused as to just the basics of
pilrc.
PilRC is several things:

1) It is a resource format. RCP files are text files that describe Palm OS resources, sometimes entirely in the text file, sometimes through links to other files on disk.

2) It is a resource compiler. This is the PILRC.EXE program. It takes the RCP files and outputs either a bunch of .bin files (one per resource) or a .ro file (a PRC file that just has resources)

3) Neil Rhodes adapted PilRC into a plugin for CodeWarrior. This version of PilRC doesn't output BIN or RO files. It instead outputs a .r file that has a Rez version of the RCP file. Rez can compile that in the CW project into resources that get linked into your app.

CW for Palm OS V8 ships with a version of Neil's plugin. It isn't the most recent one, however.

4) Its a dessert topping.

CW for Palm OS V9 does something different. It has a new linker that understands .bin and .ro files. Since the linker can handle those, we wrote a new command-line adapter plugin that lets you run the original PilRC from the IDE. This avoids translation problems that limit the usefulness of Neil's plugin, since PilRC can represent a wider range of resources than can Rez.

Can you use one of the executables to start a UI from
scratch? The example of

pilrc myprogram.rcp

looks, to me, like it's executing upon the program.rcp
file. If so, what generates the myprogram.rcp file to
start with?
You do. You can do this with a text editor, or you can use an automated editor. CW for Palm OS V9 ships with PilRC Designer, a nice PilRC-format editor. There is also a editor that Handspring made for their own use as part of their SDK -- V9 ships with that as well.

--
Ben Combee <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
CodeWarrior for Palm OS technical lead
Palm OS programming help @ www.palmoswerks.com

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