Wednesday, June 08, 2005

You can take away my buttons, but you...

The SmartPhone form designer in Visual Studio 2005 does not include support for buttons (e.g. Button, RadioButton, etc.). Of course, there are other widget absences as well, ListBoxes, RichTextBoxes, etc., but I am most dissapointed by the disappearance of buttons. Presumably, they left them out because SmartPhones lack "touch input" or any interaction devices that makes it easy to use buttons (e.g. a mouse). However, my SamSung SGH-e315 phone uses what could pass for buttons in its top level menu -- the buttons are arranged in a 3x3 matrix so that you can just press the corresponding digit on your cell phone. I think a similar mapping would work with radio buttons (e.g. have numbers next to the radio button choices and allow the user to press a number to select a radio button). (link)

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