Thursday, May 26, 2005

Why is Screens needed anyway?

Many times I get this question... why will Screens help me? Well... I now found out the hard way why Screens is needed for developers: API The PalmOS API is very low level, you deal with pointers, allocation, database locking, bit manipulations and everything is call this first then this or else... booom I am currently writing a normal PalmOS app for someone and when I found myself searching for how to handle the resolution change not even control moving and modifying... just knowing when changing into portrait/landscape mode and when the DIA is open or closed took me a long time raging over google, PalmSource and PalmOne for how to do it. These are simple things which should exist in ANY application... I am not talking about the Serial manager or bluetooth, I am talking about a frickin display basic manipulation. Sony... they realy stabbed everyone for buying thier devices by shutting down thier developer web site so no one can make apps for thier devices anymore. Smart move, Sony! And to try and figure out how to handle the T3 slider open/close, I still dont know how! Screens is going to have a very generic API without trying to be device specific. Its more like windows where you have a a generic model and have drivers to do the actual implementation. In Screens, you will write your application once, and it will automaticly use the driver its meant to use on each device. So a T3 might have one driver while the Sony device might have another driver. But the API and the applications stay the same. You think that the whole idea of an OS is to bridge between hardware, PalmOS sucks at doing that. There is a need for someone to take this forward and I dont expect PalmSource to do it, because it wont be compatible with old PalmOS versions! Which is why someone like me or maybe someone else will make a convenient, simple to use, flexible and consistent and device independent API which developers can use once on the simulator without worrying about testing on all devices.

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