"Terry Dennis" <tedennis@...> wrote in message
news:77653@palm-dev-forum...
>
> re: I'm still not following what it is you are actually trying to
accomplish
> ... why do you need the information about which group a control belongs
to?
> If you want to know something about the group selection, use
> FrmGetControlGroupSelection(). Why are you starting with the control and
> working your way up to the group?
>
> Really, it doesn't matter WHY he needs the information. He needs it.
> That's all that matters.

Call it curiosity ... it's not like I'm holding out on a secret technique
... and
I am one of the first to fault Palm on their lack of complete APIs.

...
> I don't want to get into a political pi$$ing match about who needs what,
or
> why they need it. The "Zen of Palm" afficionados need to realize that
they
> provide a tool. How that tool is used depends on the person who purchased
> the tool.

Oh, don't get me started on that one. I have _big_ questions about
whether these folks have yet realized that they are providing an Operating
System as opposed to their own private application. Some symptoms:
- fatal reset alerts put up instead of returning result codes listed in
the documentation
- a file list builder that has (undocumented) exceptions, and can not
build a
list of all dbs of a given type. (I am certain now that this is the
reason
that some doc readers "take over" the creator ID of docs on the
system
... because they can't just find all doc dbs on the basis of their
type)
- adding a ":" to whatever the programmer sets into a label in a table
(if
I wanted a colon, I'd put one there!)
- incomplete APIs _combined_with_ a "hands off" attitude to the relevant
data structures
- inconsistant treatment of form objects (you can hide _this_ but not
_that_)

The _OS_ level APIs should be application-agnostic, and give tools to the
developers. It appears that the guys writing the PalmOS applications
(launcher,
datebook, etc) and the guys writing the OS services were not keeping a
wall between their efforts. ("Hey, Jack ... if you'd pop up an alert in
this
system API then I wouldn't have to write code to check for errors every time
I called it." "Ok, Fred.")

I sincerely hope that, now that they are their own company, these guys take
a _good_ look at what their responsibilities are as an OPERATING SYSTEM
provider and take a more serious attitude to these types of problems.

....
>
> I understand the need to "hide" internals from programmers. In fact, I
was
> surprised that the platform was so immature in the early days that it
> exposed a lot of the internals to the outside world. Thankfully, the
> platform has matured a lot since then, and 5.0 is a big step forward.
But,
> there are still omissions which keep the user community from using the
tool
> to its potential.
>
...


--
-Richard M. Hartman
hartman@...

186,000 mi/sec: not just a good idea, it's the LAW!



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