In an enterprise setting, it's often desirable to control the use of the
device quite rigidly. At my company (and many others), Palms are used as
portable computers rather than PDAs, per se, and Palm's design guidelines
simply aren't appropriate for us.

Beaming and alarms may or may not be a problem, depending on the other uses
the device is put to. You're right though; without creating your own ROM,
it's pretty difficult (read 'impossible') to prevent a knowledgeable user
from exiting an application. The best one can do is to prevent clumsy or
malicious-but-unformed users from breaking out.

As you said, the reset button is the ultimate weakness; presumably, every
'dedicated' app has code to restart itself after a soft reset (as ours
does). Hard resets are another matter. My company uses SPT1x40 in our
distribution centers, and Symbol helped us out here by making the hard reset
so difficult to accomplish that even I have difficulty with it sometimes
(which should not be construed as a compliment to Symbol, by the way).


Regards,

Jeremy Neal Kelly
Software Engineer
Peapod


"Mark A. Peters" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
> Aren't there also other ways an app can be quit?  I'm thinking of the
> arrival of data via beaming or bluetooth, and the triggering of an alarm
> yielding a dialog that allows switching to some other app.
>
> Perhaps things like this come down to an app stop event showing up in the
> app's event queue, and so ignoring those will plug the hole.
>
> And of course, a reset will quit an app no matter what.
>
> In any case, isn't it considered bad design for a Palm app to prevent a
user
> from quitting?  I suppose a device dedicated to running one app is an
> exception.
>
> Mark Peters



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