Tour

The Desktop Environment

Let's start by looking at the main development screen. From this screen, we do all the development of the project.

The Palm Screen on the left shows the appearance of the form you are working on. When you select an object, its properties appear in the Properties Window on the lower right. In the example above, the field Name is highlighted. You can see the properties that can be set for this object.

On the left edge of the IDE are icons for the various objects you can place on a form. There are 13 there. The PalmScreen shows a few: there's a Label, a Field, a Checkbox, a Pushbutton, a Popup, a Listbox and a Button. Not showing are a bitmap, Gadget, Repeater, Scrollbar, Selector or Shift Indicator.

The objects are all standard Palm OS objects, with the same look and feel as the built in apps.

You can double click on an object to see its code.

The top right panel is the Project Explorer. Use this to navigate the your project. You can have multiple forms, each with its own list of objects. Each form has properties you can edit in the Properties Window. Each form also has before and after code you can edit.

The Menus section describes any menus you have created.

The Bitmaps section of the Project Explorer lets you include one or more bitmaps into your program. Bitmaps can be bmp, gif or jpg files: NS Basic/Palm will convert them to Palm format. Color bitmaps work great!

The Modules section allows you to add external NS Basic/Palm modules into your project. This makes it easier to reuse common code blocks between multiple projects. NS Basic/Palm has over 150 statements and functions.

If you click Project, you can edit your project's properties in the Properties Window. You can also define startup and termination code.