NS Basic Programming for Palm OS

Michael Verive, MD is a former scientist, currently practicing as a Pediatric Critical Care physician. He's programmed computers of every shape and size since the 70's, in 24 programming languages.. He finds the Palm devices to be indispensable in medicine as well as routine daily life, and decided to master their programming, recycling thousands of lines of code from prior projects. Chapter I - Introduction 9 Why Basic? 10 Installing NS Basic 11 Chapter II - What I meant to say was 13 Abbreviations, terms, and mnemonics 13 Conventions used in this book 16 Chapter III - Important Concepts 19 Palm OS and NS Basic-specific programming 19 Object-Oriented vs Top-Down Programming 21 Structured Programming 22 The Palm OS is "Event-driven" 24 Prototyping - know your audience! 24 Debugging/alpha/beta testing 25 When it's time to scrap it and start over 25 Chapter IV - Your first project - "Hello, World!" 27 Chapter V - Constants, Literals, Variables and Arrays 31 Constants and Literals 31 Variables 32 Arrays 36 Chapter VI - Programming Elements 39 Statements 39 Comments 40 Subroutines and Code Modules 41 Functions 44 Controlling program flow 45 Running external applications 60 Ending your NS Basic application 63 Chapter VII - Projects and Forms 65 The NS Basic Project 66 Forms 67 Chapter VIII - Screen Graphics 75 Graphics Windows 75 Drawing Graphics 79 Chapter IX - NS Basic Objects 93 Bitmap 93 Button 95 CheckBox 97 Field 101 Gadget 105 Grid 110 Label 116 List 118 PopUp 126 PushButton 133 Repeater 136 ScrollBar 138 Selector 140 Slider 143 Shift Indicator 145 Chapter X - Numeric functions 147 Standard Mathematical Functions 147 Exponents, Powers and Logs 158 Chapter XI - String Handling 163 Conversions 163 Concatenation, Extraction and Truncation 168 Searching Strings - using InStr 176 Chapter XII - Date and Time functions 179 Date Functions 180 Time Functions 187 Chapter XIII - Database Management 195 Creating Databases 197 Opening Databases 200 Closing and Erasing Databases 201 Data Access - a Parting of the Ways 203 Safely mixing keyed and non-keyed methods 222 Writing to MemoPad 226 Chapter XIV - Menus 231 Creating Menus 232 Chapter XV - Interacting with your user 237 Interacting Visually - Message and Alert Boxes 237 Interacting Audibly - Beep, Sound and PlaySound 241 Trapping user actions 244 Chapter XVI - Serial Input/Output (I/O) 249 Chapter XVII - Extending NS Basic 261 Accessing the Palm OS API 261 Shared Libraries 265 Chapter XVIII - Special Topics 271 Control Arrays 271 Printing in NS Basic 272 String parsing 277 Data Encryption 279 Sorting Data 281 Running HotSync from NS Basic 283 Soundex 284 Staying Alive 284 Saving State 285 System Info 285 SysInfoSet 286 Real Estate - location, location, location! 287 Optimizing applications for speed 287 AppendixA PalmOSsort(stringcomparison)order 293 AppendixB PalmOSFonts 295 Appendix C Accessory Programs 301 Appendix D Running POSE 309 Index 317