Subject: Re: Avoid Exit a Program From: "Jeremy Neal Kelly" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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).
The Symbol units have flash memory, not ROM. Therefore it is feasible to put a program in flash memory and run it on a hard reset, which would force a load of your application and its data. That program doesn't need to be your main application.
There is no reason a hard reset should be a weakness, you just have to deal with the implications of a loss of all files on your RAM disk.
Roger Stringer Marietta Systems, Inc. (www.mariettasystems.com)
-- For information on using the Palm Developer Forums, or to unsubscribe, please see http://www.palmos.com/dev/support/forums/
