Palm Programming: The Developer's Guide

Beaming

In this section, we discuss beaming. First, we give you a general overview of beaming, describe the user interface, and offer you a few useful tips. Next, we provide a checklist that you can use to implement beaming in an application. Last, we implement beaming in the Sales application.

Beaming and the Exchange Manager

The Exchange Manager is in charge of exchanging of information between Palm OS devices and other devices. This manager is new to Palm OS 3.0 and is built on industry standards.

Currently, the Exchange Manager works only over an infrared link, although it may be enhanced in the future to work over other links (such as TCP/IP or email). The exchange manager uses the ObEx Infrared Data Association (IrDA) standard to exchange information. As a result, it should be possible to exchange information between Palm OS devices and other devices that implement this ObEx standard.

Note

For information on IrDA standards, see http://www.irda.org. For information on Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME), see http://www.mindspring.com/~mgrand/mime.html or http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/hypertext/faq/usenet/mail/mime-faq/top.html.

How Beaming Works

Applications that support this feature usually allow beaming either a single item or an entire category. When the user chooses the Beam menu item, a dialog appears showing that the beam is being prepared. Then it searches for another device using infrared. Once it finds the other device, it beeps and starts sending the data. After ...