Jargon Text

Jargon Text is a Buzzword laden report generator for Palm OS. Copyright © 2001 Shawn P. Garbett

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA

Sources files and the original PRC to JargonText are provided in this directory.

The original code came from Leo Brodie's Starting Forth. This was the second programming book that I ever read. It was way back in 1984. It had a buzzword generation program that was across three forth blocks.

I was pleased to discover an easy programming environment for my new Palm, and it was Quartus Forth. I downloaded the evaluation copy, and was shocked at how easy it was to program. I was even more shocked to realize that I still knew how to code forth. To make it even easier with the RsrcEdit tool which allowed for editing of the resources for the application without ever leaving the palm.

I decided to implement the Buzzword generation program from the old example because of a running joke going around among my collegues. Working throught the hello world example from Palm Programming: A Developer's Guide by Neil Rhodes and Julie McKeehan I rewrote it in forth on the palm. Another shocking revelation, the forth code took about two screen pages on the palm. The original C version was 2 pages of printed C code, another page of the header and another page of the resource script. Plus all the compilers and linkers and other stuff you'd need just to create a hello world. Forth seemed like the easier route to develop on the Palm OS after this.

The str-ext file contains routines for copying and retrieving text from a buffer. These a forth programmer might find helpful in general. If you use it and find a better way to do this, please let me know.

The scroll file contains routines to manipulate a scrollbar inconjunction with a text field. I made the routines more generic than the Palm Programming book's version. The routines in that book were hard coded to a specific scrollbar and textfield. The routines I have take the scrollbar and textfield id's as input for all manipulations making it more generic. Look at their usage in the main file jargon.

Known Bugs

1. scrollRepeatEvents are not being propagated by Quartus Forth correctly. Will fix as soon as Quartus fixes. This prevents dynamic scrollbar usage. Currently using the scrollExitEvent to do a scrollbar update when the scrollbar is let go.

Things to do

1. Add an editor for buzzwords and filler text used.

I'm a computer consultant and I'm available for hire to do Palm applications. I can do them in C/C++ or Forth. Please contact me if you're interested.

Enjoy,

Shawn Garbett
220 Oak Road
Powell, TN 37849
March, 12 2001
Shawn@Garbett.org
www.garbett.org