Other Development Tools
Miscellaneous Development Tools
This article covers development tools not covered in the articles about C/C++(DevToolsCCPP), data collection systems(DevToolsDataCollection) and other high-level languages(OtherHighLevelLanguageSystems).
Assembly
If you're a blood-and-guts programmer who thinks C is for wussies, you'll be happy to know that there's a well-supported Palm assembler called Pila.There's also a PRC disassembler called PilDis, which runs under Windows. PilDis can label Palm OS API trap calls with the name of the API.
PRC-Hacking Tools
PilRC is an application that takes a resource script file and generates one or more binary resource files that are to be used when developing for the Palm Computing Platform. Usually used as part of the GCC toolchain, you may need to refer to the maintainer as new OS versions come out.
Prc2Pilrc extracts all the resources from a PRC file. Most resources it can extract into PilRC format, and the rest it just extracts as raw binary data.
PTools is a resource and database viewer written in Java. It can open .prc/.pdb/.bin files and display forms and bitmaps graphically, and it can display strings and stringlists. It can also display most things as PilRC style resources and everything in a hex dump form. It's free and full source code is included. This is a cool way to poke around in your program or database files to see what's there and get a look at how things are done.
Prc2Bin breaks a resource database (PRC) file down to its constituent resources. Each resource is written as a separate file. You can use this to break down a .PRC file into it's seperate parts, change some of them and then use Pila or build-prc to put them back together.
Resource File Tools
Alvin Koh has created a program called rsrc2rcp which converts CodeWarrior resource files to PilRC format. Previously, the only way to do this was to use one of the above PRC-hacking tools on a pre-existing PRC file. This tool is great if you find CodeWarrior sample code on the net but want to convert it to build under PRC-Tools and PilRC.Deployment Tools Beiks LLC has developed Pilot Catapult which is a Windows product for packaging your Palm OS application and its conduit for automatic installation on your users' PCs. The cost is $100 for the supported version, though there is apparently a free unsupported version.
Warren Young wrote a set of tools for shareware program key management called PORT. This tool set takes care of everything from parsing the order data that PalmGear sends you when a customer registers your product, to generating a registration key from that info, to building the registration email you send to your new customer. These tools are all free software, licensed under the GNU GPL, with the exception of the one file you link with your program for verifying keys. They're designed to work best on Unix/Linux systems, but they will work on Windows without too much trouble.
Copyright © 2000-2001 by Warren Young, © 1997 by Wade Hatler. All rights reserved.
19 Feb 2003