Notes on Palm Query Applications 
Written for "The Ultimate Guide to the PalmPilot" By David Pogue

These notes written by Dave Menconi
4/24/99

Developement Notes

I wrote these PQAs as simple examples of how to write PQAs. As much as possible I gave them all the same basic form because that made it easier to write them and because, to my mind, this is the correct basic form: a title graphic, a title, a link to some important notes (which might not be necessary to every PQA), the basic form or links of the PQA and some credits. That's not to say that this is the ONLY form for a PQA but I think it's the most obvious, and simple form. And simple is good when you have such a small screen. 

Notice that not all of the layouts work equally well. Some push the credit line off the screen. Some are not really formatted well. My advice is that you critically examine these PQAs. Every one of the problems could have been corrected if I had broken from the rigid rules I chose to follow. The title graphic could have been smaller, I could have changed the formatting of the links, I could have made the title smaller or eliminated it, I could have eliminated the "Caution!" link in some cases. I suppose the first rule is "Don't make PQAs on an assembly line; each one should be crafted by itself."

I included all the elements of the PQAs (and multiple copies of this readme -- hey, it's a CD) so that you could get the maximum benefits of my efforts. You should take them apart. Examine the graphics; examine the HTML. Ask yourself, "what is this doing here?" I'm sure I put in some stuff that wasn't necessary (we all make mistakes) but, for the most part, everything has a purpose. And there are a few hidden elements that you'll probably never find without looking in the HTML.


GRAPHICS

Creating two icons for your PQA is very important. Ideally the graphic should be unique and have something to do with your PQA. But just using text as I did in most cases works pretty well. I found that white text outlined in black works better than the reverse. No matter what font you use it's likely to look a bit comic. For the small icons you will probably have to use text and little enough of that. In a few cases I resorted to drawing characters pixel by pixel. I tried to keep the diamond and the over the air icon even in the small icon but many of the original content providers didn't bother -- they wanted to use those few pixels of width for the graphic or to include a square boder around their lettering.



I hope you've found these PQAs intersting and useful. 
Dave Menconi
devpqa@menconi.com