Re: gcc for pilot

[pmai@acm.org (Pierre R. Mai)]

Shaun Lipscombe <shaun.lipscombe@gasops.co.uk> writes:

> I want to develop Palm apps on my debian laptop, is there a gcc that
> allows cross-compiling to the Palm architecture, or anything 'free'
> that I can obtain from somewhere?  CodeWarrior looks cool but I don't
> have that much disposable income (considering I am only gonna be
> mucking around).

Rob Tillotson has already pointed you in the right direction, so let
me just add some comments:

a) The Debian packaging of the cross-compilation tools is very nice,
   especially in combination with pilot-template, which makes starting 
   a first project that much easier... Great work, and a big thank-you 
   to all those involved.  Debian is definitely great, even for doing
   non-Linux work :)

b) Get yourself the SDK Dokumentation from Palm which is available in
   PDF format.  This is pretty much necessary for programming the
   Pilot.  Sometimes it's a bit vague, but generally it will give you
   most of the nitty-gritty information you'll need.

c) Get yourself the fine new O'Reilly Book "Palm Programming - The
   Developer's Guide" from Neil Rhodes & Julie McKeehan.  As someone
   has already posted, it contains a nice CD, although with Debian,
   mostly the included PalmOS SDK Documentation and the examples are
   valuable, everything else you've got already...
   
   The nice thing about this book is that it gives you a very good
   overview of what you'll have to do to reach your goal, taking you
   all the way through continuing to build a useful application.  I
   had to do without it for my first applications, and it would have
   been definitely much easier with this book...

d) Don't shed a tear for Metroworks CodeWarrior.  It _looks_ nice, but 
   it is quite unstable and buggy, crashing often, and sometimes
   producing corrupt binaries in subtle ways...  The included Resource 
   Tool is nice, but given that most Palm apps don't include more
   than maybe 10-20 simple screens, writing resources from hand with
   pilrc isn't that much of a burden.  Otherwise I find it a soso
   Windows IDE, definitely not that great (although not as brain-dead
   as most Visual products) and I much prefer my XEmacs-based
   environment.

   I started out programming the Palm (then it was a Pilot ;) on Linux 
   with gcc for my private fun, but when we decided to use it for a
   data-entry application (on a Symbol SPT1500 with included bar-code
   scanner[1]) for one of our clients, we went with CodeWarrior, as it
   was the officially supported development environment, and the
   maintenance of the application would be done by some Windows-shop.

   In retro-spect, this was a bad decission, although we didn't really 
   have much choice...

Have fun...

Regs, Pierre.

Footnotes: 
[1]  This thing makes for a nice toy, see http://www.symbol.com/... ;)

-- 
Pierre Mai <pmai@acm.org>               http://home.pages.de/~trillian/
  "One smaller motivation which, in part, stems from altruism is Microsoft-
   bashing." [Microsoft memo, see http://www.opensource.org/halloween1.html]