About This Guide

The Photon Programmer's Guide is intended for developers of Photon applications. It describes how to create applications and the widgets that make up their user interfaces, with and without using the Photon Application Builder (PhAB).

If you're familiar with earlier versions of Photon, you should read the What's New appendix. to find out how Photon and its widgets have changed in this release.

This table may help you find what you need in this book:

For information about:	See:
Photon, widgets, and PhAB	Introduction
Getting started with PhAB	Tutorials
PhAB's user interface	PhAB's Environment
Creating, opening, and saving applications in PhAB	Working with Applications
PhAB modules, such as windows, dialogs, and menus	Working with Modules
Adding, deleting, and modifying widgets in PhAB	Creating Widgets in PhAB
Initializing a widget's resources and callbacks	Editing Resources and Callbacks in PhAB
Setting the sizes of a widget and its children	Geometry Management
Getting PhAB to generate code	Generating, Compiling, and Running Code
Editing code generated by PhAB	Working with Code
Getting and setting widget resources	Manipulating Resources in Application Code
Adding or modifying widgets “on the fly” at runtime	Managing Widgets in Application Code
Building special areas into a widget	Control Surfaces
Using internal links to refer to PhAB modules	Accessing PhAB Modules from Code
Developing a multilingual application	International Language Support
Adding help information to your application	Context-Sensitive Help
Communicating with a Photon application	Interprocess Communication
Threads, work procedures, and background processing	Parallel Operations
Using `PtRaw` and Photon's low-level drawing routines	Raw Drawing and Animation
Encodings, fonts, languages and code tables	Understanding Encodings, Fonts, Languages and Code Tables
Photon's fonts	Fonts
Printing in a Photon application	Printing
Transferring data from one widget or application to another	Drag and Drop
Photon's regions	Regions
Interaction between applications, users, and the Photon server	Events
Working with windows and modal dialogs	Window Management
Developing applications “by hand” without PhAB	Programming Photon without PhAB
Photon's implementation	Photon Architecture
PhAB's widget icons	Widgets at a Glance
Handling international characters	Unicode Multilingual Support
Building an embedded system	Photon in Embedded Systems
Differences between the Windows and native QNX Neutrino versions of PhAB	Using PhAB under Microsoft Windows
Photon terminology	Glossary

Typographical conventions

Throughout this manual, we use certain typographical conventions to distinguish technical terms. In general, the conventions we use conform to those found in IEEE POSIX publications. The following table summarizes our conventions:

Reference	Example
Code examples	`if( stream == NULL )`
Command options	`-lR`
Commands	`make`
Environment variables	PATH
File and pathnames	`/dev/null`
Function names	exit()
Keyboard chords	Ctrl-Alt-Delete
Keyboard input	`something you type`
Keyboard keys	Enter
Program output	`login:`
Programming constants	NULL
Programming data types	`unsigned short`
Programming literals	`0xFF`, `"message string"`
Variable names	stdin
User-interface components	Cancel

We use an arrow (→) in directions for accessing menu items, like this:

You'll find the Other... menu item under Perspective-->Show View.

We use notes, cautions, and warnings to highlight important messages:

Notes point out something important or useful.

Cautions tell you about commands or procedures that may have unwanted or undesirable side effects.

Warnings tell you about commands or procedures that could be dangerous to your files, your hardware, or even yourself.

Note to Windows users

In our documentation, we use a forward slash (/) as a delimiter in all pathnames, including those pointing to Windows files.

We also generally follow POSIX/UNIX filesystem conventions.

Navigation buttons

At the top and bottom of our HTML docs, you'll see some or all of these buttons:

Use this button:	To move:
	To the previous part of the document.
	“Up” in the document: In a prose book, this typically takes you to About This Guide. In a reference book, it takes you to the listing of items that start with a given letter. For example, if you're looking at the docs for abs(), this button takes you to the listing of the functions that start with `A`.
	To the keyword index.
	To the next part of the document.

Technical support

To obtain technical support for any QNX product, visit the Support area on our website (www.qnx.com). You'll find a wide range of support options, including community forums.