Mar 98 Factory Floor
Volume Number: 14
Issue Number: 3
Column Tag: From The Factory Floor
CodeWarrior for PalmPilot
by Dave Mark, Eric Cloninger, and the Metrowerks PalmPilot development team,
©1997 by Metrowerks, Inc., all rights reserved.
This month, we're going to talk with Eric Cloninger and the rest of the CodeWarrior
for PalmPilot development team. In case you haven't seen one, the PalmPilot is a
handheld organizer that offers contact management and calendaring functions, along
with the ability to run 3rd party applications. Metrowerks CodeWarrior for
PalmPilot lets you use your Macintosh to develop your own PalmPilot applications.
Eric Cloninger is the Engineering Manager for "Scribbly Things" at Metrowerks. He
can be reached at ericc@metrowerks.com. When he isn't investigating the mysteries of
software development, Eric is hard at work playing with his four month old son,
Elijah. In the few hours a week left to his own devices, he can be found concocting
recipes for homebrewed beer, playing softball, or watching the Colorado Rockies blow
it in the ninth inning. At night, he dreams of tall mountains, blue skies, and deep
powder.
Andrew Southwick is the Constructor for PalmPilot developer. Andrew and his evil
twin, Werdna, can be encountered on Quake servers worldwide. Mark Corry works on
the Mac- and Windows-hosted debuggers for PalmPilot. When he isn't tinkering with
the Metrowerks Debugger, he's tinkering with a '29 Model A Ford.
Honggang Zhang works on the Windows-hosted debuggers for PalmPilot, Windows CE,
Windows NT, Windows 95, and Java. Away from work, she's applying her knowledge of
chemistry to build the perfect carrot cake recipe.
Alex Harper provided Quality Assurance for CodeWarrior for PalmPilot. Although he
has recently moved on to other projects at Metrowerks, he can still be found lurking
about the PalmPilot news groups and harassing the CodeWarrior engineers to make
sure his pet features make it into the next release.
Dave: Tell me about the PalmPilot architecture?
Eric: The PalmPilot uses a Motorola 68328 chip. It's so similar to the 680x0 chip
used in the Macintosh that most developers won't notice the difference. The device
itself is roughly the size of a deck of playing cards and fits in your shirt pocket (or it
would if that stylish CodeWarrior shirt you are wearing had pockets). It has a
pressure-sensitive display area that responds to a stylus as well as a data entry area
where the user enters characters.
Unlike the Newton, the PalmPilot doesn't try to interpret the users' handwriting. The
PalmPilot uses Graffiti -- a system of strokes that are roughly equivalent to the block
alphabet. It takes about an hour to figure out the letters and numbers and a few more
hours to learn the special characters. There is also a virtual keyboard that pops up on
request for those obscure characters (like how to get a grave accent character over an
'e').
Currently, the device has a black and white screen. Older models, the 1000 and 5000,
came with either 128K or 512K of RAM. The newer models, the Personal and
Professional, contain either 512K or 1MB of RAM. The Personal and Professional
offer a TCP/IP stack and the Professional has a built-in email client.
As an organizer, the PalmPilot is useful. It has a date book, address book, to-do list,
and memo pad in ROM. If that was all it was, it wouldn't be any more interesting than
something Radio Shack sells for $39.95. The great thing about the PalmPilot is that a