SapphireButtons

As developers, we can spend quite a lot of effort getting the flow right for our application to make life easier for our users. However, since the nature of Pocket PC devices is to make everything compact and small, the amount of screen space available for buttons on our application is rather limited. Rather than having layers of options hidden menus and screens, we can make use of the other hardware buttons on the device. The Sapphire Buttons Utility allows your application to identify if a button was pressed by the user. Based on what was pressed, you can perform a specific function or display a specific screen. It also helps you users from losing the application by accidentally pressing the button for one of the system applications.

Product Features

The Sapphire Buttons Utility makes reading the button status easy with the following functionality:

• Check what button is pressed
• Retrieve the button name
• Enable and disable system buttons

You can download the latest demo version to see a fully working demo which you can reuse within your application as you see fit. This can be found on the download pages. The demo versions are fully functional and simply contain a popup message from time to time. These are ideal if you are selling your application to the client where you can be confident the application will work in practice and not just theory.

Sample Code

Implementation couldn’t be easier, simply declare the DLL function as a function within your application and call it as though you wrote it yourself. Here’s a sample demo to show how a simple timer can keep track of what button was pressed within VB.NET.

Private Sub tmrButtons_Tick(ByVal sender As System.Object, _
            ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles tmrButtons.Tick

  Dim lButton As Integer

  Dim lKey1 As Integer

  Dim lKey2 As Integer

  lButton = sButtons(1234567890, lKey1, lKey2)

  If lButton = 0 Then

    lblButton.Text = ""

  Else

    If lKey2 = 0 Then

      lblButton.Text = ButtonName(lKey1)

    Else

      lblButton.Text = ButtonName(lKey1) & " (" & ButtonName(lKey2) & ")"

    End If

  End If

End Sub

Royalty Free Licence

When you purchase a developer’s licence, you are free to use the DLL in any number of your projects and deploy it to all the devices to your clients. There’s no need for royalties based on the scale of your project, just a one off fee. You will also get 12 months email support and discounted upgrades for future developments.