[CoMoDev] Re: A new onboard Palm resource editor
- From: David Beers <david@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <comodev@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 29 Dec 2004 14:03:22 -0700
There was some discussion about the fact that where RsrcEdit doesn't handle
stuff after OS 4 very well, Bird really *only* runs on OS 5 devices. Philippe
was trying to make it so you could develop software on the Palm that targets OS
5 devices, so he assumed you'd be using an OS 5 machine. After all, you
couldn't very well compile and run on a device that doesn't support the traps
used in the software, right? In that sense I guess it's a complement, not a
replacement to RsrcEdit.
As far as I can see the odd behavior with the menus relates to trying to run in
on an OS < 5 as well. Menus are normal on my T3, and mixed up on my OS 4.1
Samsung i500. That *is* a weird bug!
It's in its first beta release, so I'm sure he'll hammer the kinks out--or at
least check the OS version during startup. If there are any Pascal fanatics
out there he welcomes patch submissions. Anyway, it's already way better than
RsrcEdit for editing bitmaps. A thing of beauty, really! The one feature I
miss is that you can't yet beam a record database to another device. RsrcEdit
always filled that gap well (the system only beams applications, not
databases), which is handy when you need to do quick tests on a few different
devices.
David
On Wed, 29 Dec 2004 13:37:02 -0700, Rick Sands wrote:
> Thanks for the tip... It's a good first go and deserves to be
> watched. Your comments about RsrcEdit (currently "maintained" by
> Quartus.net), are right on the mark. However, BIRD has it's own
> problems, too. For example, it calls traps not available on some a
> basic OS 4.x emulator when trying to open a bitmap. Another is
> that is "assumes" the same menu as the application it may have
> opened (e.g. Open AddressBook and the BIRD screen showing the
> resources has gets it's menu from the AddressBook itself).
>
> My guess is that BIRD will evolve faster than RsrcEdit, so again,
> this is an app to watch.
>
> -Rick
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: comodev-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:comodev-
> bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of David Beers Sent: Wednesday,
> December 29, 2004 9:25 AM To: comodev@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject:
> [CoMoDev] A new onboard Palm resource editor
>
> 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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