Constructor or PilRC Designer?
The Constructor made its debut on the Macintosh platform and was subsequently ported to Windows. The port works well enough, although not without some quirks (see my article "EC: A Euro Calculator for the Palm," DDJ, January 2000). The output file is in binary format, which isn't particularly conducive to version control. Still, I have successfully archived these files in Visual SourceSafe as binary blobs. The Constructor's Mac ancestry also created an extra step after linking, requiring the PalmRez Post Linker to convert Mac-formatted resources to the PalmOS.
The Constructor handles complex forms very well. It hides or shows unusable objects, and displays a form's object hierarchy. There's also an alignment tool to keep your objects straight, saving you the trouble of counting pixels. The built-in bitmap editor is convenient. And if you need to work with sound, the Constructor lets you manage .WAV files.
These features are absent in PilRC Designer, but PilRC Designer has advantages of its own. It has broad support for skins beyond Palm handhelds and includes devices from Sony, Symbol, the defunct HandEra, and the wide display AlphaSmart Dana. It has zoom capability that makes working in high resolutions (1600×1024, for instance) easy on the eyes. Its resource files are in text format. This means the files are portable between Linux and Windows, can be stored in version control without a fuss, and it avoids the need for the PalmRez Post Linker. PilRC Designer can also read the Constructor's binary file, importing what it understands and flagging as unknown what it doesn't, such as .WAV resources. Currently, there is no simple method to go the other way, from PilRC's text format to the Constructor's binary format.
There is considerable uncertainty regarding PilRC Designer's future. The product is no longer formally supported and the developer's web site, http://www.falch.net/, is down most of the time. You wouldn't necessarily be stranded if you already committed to PilRC Designer because it is really a front end to PilRC. PilRC is the underlying resource compiler, and its source code and binaries are available under GNU GPL (see http://www.ardiri.com/). If you are comfortable designing in a text editor, you can use PilRC as a standalone tool.
—M.Y.
