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C H A P T E R 1
What's New in Newton 2.0
There are many new protos supplied in the new system ROM. There are new
pop-up button pickers, map-type pickers, and several new time, date, and duration
pickers. There are new protos that support the display of overviews and lists based
on soup entries. There are new protos that support the input of rich strings (strings
that contain either recognized characters or ink text). There are a variety of new
scroller protos. There is an integrated set of protos designed to make it easy for you
to display status messages to the user during lengthy or complex operations.
Generic list pickers, available in system 1.0, have been extended to support bitmap
items that can be hit-tested as two-dimensional grids. For example, a phone keypad
can be included as a single item in a picker. Additionally, list pickers can now
scroll if all the items can't fit on the screen.
Data Storage
There are many enhancements to the data storage system for system software 2.0.
General soup performance is significantly improved. A tagging mechanism for
soup entries makes changing folders much faster for the user. You can use the
tagging mechanism to greatly speed access to subsets of entries in a soup. Queries
support more features, including the use of multiple slot indexes, and the query
interface is cleaner. Entry aliases make it easy to save unique references to soup
entries for fast access later without holding onto the actual entry.
A new construct, the virtual binary object, supports the creation and manipulation
of very large objects that could not be accommodated in the NewtonScript heap.
There is a new, improved soup change-notification mechanism that gives applications
more control over notification and how they respond to soup changes. More precise
information about exactly what changed is communicated to applications. Soup
data can now be built directly into packages in the form of a store part. Additionally,
packages can contain protos and other objects that can be exported through magic
pointer references, and applications can import such objects from available packages.
Text Input
The main change to text input involves the use of ink text. The user can choose to
leave written text unrecognized and still manipulate the text by inserting, deleting,
reformatting, and moving the words around, just as with recognized text. Ink words
and recognized words can be intermixed within a single paragraph. A new string
format, called a rich string, handles both ink and recognized text in the same string.
There are new protos,
, that you can use in your application to allow
users to enter ink text in fields. In addition, the view classes