[CoMoDev] A new onboard Palm resource editor
- From: David Beers <david@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <comodev@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 29 Dec 2004 09:25:09 -0700
Back when I used to commute on public transportation I fell in love with
OnBoardC, a tiny Palm OS IDE that runs right on your Palm handheld. Call me
crazy, but it was a lot of fun to work on Palm development projects on my
Handspring Visor while riding the bus or munching my Big Mac on a lunch break.
Eventually, I was able to get the source code from its generous original
developer and put the project out on SourceForge where it has developed nicely
for the last couple of years. These days I am in front of my "big" computer
just about all the time so I don't do much programming on my PDA. But like a
lot of other Palm developers I know I still have used one part of the OnBoard
Suite regularly: RsrcEdit.
RsrcEdit is a wonderful tool that enables you to browse and edit all the
resources in a Palm application or database. It was designed to be an onboard
GUI builder for Palm OS applications, but that's just one of a million uses. I
have often used it to diagnose problems in the way a conduit is writing out
records to a database. It's also great if you are in an early stage of
development and need to manually create a database for testing. I often use it
for quickly beaming databases from one device to another when testing on
different devices, something you can't do with the regular Palm launcher. And
it's great in idle moments to open up the PRC for your favorite applications
and make small tweaks of the user interface to suit you: rearrange forms to
your liking, create nicer icons with the bitmap editor, etc. If you're good
with 68k assembly you can hack the code using RsrcEdit as well.
The problem is that RsrcEdit went to a commercial developer before the OnBoardC
community was able to get its hands on it and open the source, and that
developer has just sat on it for 3 years. That's an eternity in PDA time, so
RsrcEdit has really been showing its age. No support for all the new resource
types since OS 3.5, no hires graphic support, and also some bugs (mostly small
memory leaks) that have never been fixed. The good news is that Philippe
Guillot has finally written a new version of RsrcEdit from the ground up and
offered it as open source freeware. He calls it Bird and from what I have seen
it's got everything that RsrcEdit had and much more. If you do much C API Palm
development, you owe it to yourself to download it and give it a try:
http://ppcompiler.free.fr/file/bird.zip
If you know Philippe, you won't be surprised to find out that he wrote Bird
completely on his Palm handheld in Pascal. All the files in the zip archive
besides Bird.prc (which is the app) are source code in Palm doc format. Of
course, you can get the free onboard standard Pascal compiler that he developed
on his web site, too: http://ppcompiler.free.fr/index.php?lng=en. Not only can
you compile native 68k apps for Palm OS with this, you can actually generate
native ARM code (PACE Native Objects). Amazing! But not for the faint of
heart!
David
=========================
David Beers
Pikesoft Mobile Computing
www.pikesoft.com
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