You have to make your api if you want advanced drawing primitives... or wait for cobalt.
Well, if you call a thick line advanced :-)
Generally you can do everything with WinDrawPixels(..), but some "basic" operations like drawing ellipsoids or stuff would be nice. I can't believe it's that big a function.
The early Palm OS philosophy was to supply only the things which nearly all handheld-tuned applications would need, and leave the others as exercises to the few readers who would care (or for whom consuming the power and/or memory was worthwhile.)
Over time, hardware has improved enough to justify having more and more built in to the OS. Therefore, Palm OS Cobalt has a great path-based drawing model, similar to PostScript or OpenGL, which does all sorts of whizzy things like arbitrary rotation, scaling, shearing, antialiased lines and text, etc., like what you were expecting.
So yes, it is unfortunately more work on older devices, but that's mostly because very few people needed arbitrarily thick lines which weren't horizontal or vertical.
-David Fedor PalmSource, Inc.
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