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Odds are you're itching to get busy doing interesting things with your Treo device. Rather than wait and show you how to carry out important tasks with your Treo as each chapter unfolds, I thought it might help to give you a quick primer and let you hit the ground running.

So this chapter begins by exploring the basics of the Treo user interface, and then moves on to showing you exactly how to perform several of the most common functions you'll likely be carrying out on a regular basis: making phone calls, sending text messages, visiting web pages, taking digital pictures, searching your Treo for text, and so forth. Later chapters dig into all these topics in more detail, but this chapter gets you busy using your device for practical, everyday tasks.

Treo essentials:
Chapter 2: Performing the Treo Essentials Part I

• Navigate the Treo User Interface
• Make a Phone Call

Topics Covered in Part II

• Send a Text Message
• Visit a Web Page
• Take a Digital Picture
• Use the Calculator
• Search Your Treo for Text
• Reset Your Treo
• Preserve the Treo Battery

Click here for Part II

Part I: Performing the Treo Essentials

Navigate the Treo User Interface

The engineers at Palm went to a great deal of effort to design the Treo user interface so that it's ruthlessly efficient at allowing you to carry out common tasks with minimal effort. Everyday tasks such as making a phone call and replying to an email message were studied in detail, with the end result being a reduction in the number of actions required on your part to carry out these tasks. For example, dialing a recent number on your Treo requires as few as three button presses via the five-way navigator. These efficiency gains in the Treo user interface are subtle, but they dramatically affect the device's usability. The following sections examine the basics of navigating around the Treo user interface and uncover some of these efficiencies.

Traverse Screens and Controls

Although you might have an affinity for using the stylus, eventually you will come to appreciate the usefulness of the five-way navigator. With this control, you can move throughout the Treo user interface with your thumb while holding the device in the same hand. In other words, you can do just about anything on your Treo with one hand. Granted, I wouldn't recommend typing text with one hand unless you have a physical limitation, but most people are accustomed to using a mobile phone with one hand. The five-way navigator enables you to carry this usability pattern over to your Treo.

The five-way navigator actually consists of five different buttons in one control: Left, Right, Up, Down, and Center. The first four buttons serve primarily as directional navigational controls, and the Center button functions as a selection button for making choices. You can generally think of the five-way navigator buttons as serving as a crude mouse, with four of the buttons accounting for mouse directions and the Center button corresponding to entering mouse clicks. Of course, you can also use the stylus as a useful alternative to the five-way navigator. You'll likely find your own unique approach to navigating your Treo that involves a combination of the five-way navigator and the stylus.

Many screens on the Treo present a sequence of controls, such as a group of command buttons. To move between these controls with the five-way navigator, just press the Up, Down, Left, and Right buttons to move to the control in the desired direction. Many screens are laid out so that you can move vertically to activate different groups of controls and then move horizontally within each group. Figure 2.1 shows the Day view in the Calendar application, which is a good example of how the directional buttons on the five-way navigator are used to navigate through an application.


Figure 2.1: The weekday selection control at the top of
the screen, along with the hour list and command buttons
along the bottom, demonstrate the flexible user interface
in the Calendar application.

In the Calendar application shown in Figure 2.1, you can press the Left and Right buttons on the five-way navigator to change the weekday along the top of the screen. Pressing the Down button shifts the focus to the hour list, which you can use to select specific hours of the day to schedule appointments. By pressing the Center button to activate the hour list, you can then move within the specific hours of the day by pressing Up and Down. Press the Center button again, followed by the Down button, and you can access any of the command buttons along the bottom of the screen by using the Left and Right buttons, of course. If you experiment with the five-way navigator in applications such as Calendar, you'll see a deliberate rhyme and reason to how the Treo's user interface flows.

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Note - You can use the stylus to interact with controls on any Treo screen. For example, to scroll a list with the stylus, just tap the arrows at the ends of the list. You can also tap and drag the slider in the middle of a scroll bar for exact scroll positioning.

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By default, the hour list in the Calendar application shows exactly enough hours of the day to fit on one screen. Some lists in your Treo don't have enough room to show their entire contents, in which case you must scroll to see more of the list. The Up and Down buttons on the five-way navigator are used to scroll up and down within a list. In many lists, you can also scroll a page of data at a time by holding down the Option key with your left thumb while pressing the Up or Down button with your right thumb. In lists where the default action of the Up and Down buttons is to scroll the entire list, use the Center button with the Up and Down buttons to scroll between individual items in the list.

Just as the Up and Down buttons are useful for navigating lists where information flows vertically, the Left and Right buttons are important in allowing you to navigate left and right through text entry controls. For example, the Memos application (see Figure 2.2) basically serves as a way to create and organize simple text notes. When entering a memo, you'll likely need to back up and change or delete text, and you can use the Left and Right buttons to move around within a memo's text. Of course, the Up and Down buttons still come into play for navigating up and down through memo text, but for quick corrections, the Left and Right buttons are invaluable.


Figure 2.2: The text edit control in the Memos application
is a good example of where the Left and Right buttons come
into play for navigating through text as you enter it.

A critical concept to understand when navigating through the Treo user interface is highlighting, which indicates that a control has the input focus and is ready for action. In other words, a highlighted control is ready for a press of the Center button to carry out some action. This action varies depending on the type of control. For example, pressing the Center button while a command button on the screen is highlighted results in the command being issued. On the other hand, pressing the Center button while a list is highlighted activates the list so that you can edit individual list items. You can easily tell whether a control is highlighted because it has a noticeable blue glow around it; for lists, the blue "glow" comes in the form of horizontal blue bars above and below the list. Figure 2.3 shows how these two horizontal bars frame the email list in the VersaMail application.

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Note - You can often jump directly to the command buttons along the bottom of a screen by pressing the Right button on the five-way navigator.

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Figure 2.3: The email list in the VersaMail application is highlighted with
horizontal bars above and below the list.

When a list is highlighted, you must push the Center button to activate the list and access the items within it. The highlight bars disappear, and one of the items in the list gains the input focus. To deactivate the list and return to the other controls on the screen, press the Left button. The highlight bars return to the list, indicating that you can press the Up and Down buttons to navigate to other controls on the screen.

Highlights don't always come in the form of a blue glow around an item. Phone numbers, email addresses, and links on web pages are highlighted by being shown in reverse text. For a web page that normally displays black text on a white background, the highlight around a Web link appears with white text on a black background. Press the Center button to activate a phone, an email, or a link highlight. This results in the phone number being dialed, a new email message being created, or a Web link being traversed.

Speaking of reverse text indicating highlighting, this is exactly how text is highlighted in a text edit field. I'm sure you've selected text in a desktop application and cut and pasted it into another application. The selection concept on the Treo is the same—you block off a selection of text, which then becomes highlighted. Some text edit fields don't immediately allow you to edit them; instead, they show the entire text contents highlighted. Simply press the Center button to begin editing the text. Press the Center button again when you're finished editing the text.

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Note - Speaking of cut and paste, the Treo 600 and 650 devices have a 1KB limit on how much text can be copied or cut to the Clipboard for pasting. With some third-party applications, such as FieldPlus by Ansel Rognlie, you can overcome this limitation with a much larger Clipboard buffer. FieldPlus also adds the capability of selecting a block of text with the five-way navigator, which is unfortunately a feature lacking in the Treo user interface. To download FieldPlus, visit a site with Treo software downloads, such as http://mytreo.net.

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Unfortunately, selecting a block of text on Treo devices can be accomplished only via the stylus. In other words, there's no way to select a block of text with the five-way navigator without the aid of third-party software. This is a strange limitation, but I have to admit that the stylus provides a more effective way to select text. To select a block of text with the stylus, just tap and drag the stylus across the text. To highlight a word, double-tap the stylus on the word. To highlight an entire line of text, triple-tap the stylus anywhere on the line. Quadruple-tap the stylus to...just kidding on that one! Triple-tapping is as fancy as the stylus shortcut moves get.

About the Author
Michael Morrison is a writer, developer, toy inventor, and author of a variety of computer technology books and interactive Web-based courses. He has been using wireless handheld devices for over a decade, dating back to early HP handheld calculators. His previous books include Special Edition Using Pocket PC 2002, The Unauthorized Guide to Pocket PC, Beginning Mobile Phone Game Programming, and Sams Teach Yourself Wireless Java in 21 Days.



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