Chapter 1

and as simple a set of menu commands as possible. Cascaded menu items are used slightly
more frequently in the Series 60 interface, where they appear as illustrated in Figure 1.4.
Figure 1.4
In the UIQ emulator, use the menu with the pen, and you'll see some interesting visual cues
to confirm the option you selected: the option will flash very briefly before the menu
disappears. It took a long time to get that effect just right!
As with all other elements of a Symbian OS GUI and applications in which a keyboard is
available (including the keyboard of a PC that is running the emulator) you can drive the
menus with the keyboard as well as with the pen. You can use the arrow keys and Enter to
select items. You can also use cursor keys and the Confirm button on real target hardware
and emulators that support such features.
When writing an application you also have the option to assign a shortcut key to any menu
item, which allows you to invoke the relevant function directly from a keyboard, without going
through the menus at all. Although they can be defined in any Symbian OS application,
shortcut keys are clearly not usable on mobile phones without keyboards (except when the
application is running the emulator) so neither the UIQ nor the Series 60 user interfaces
display shortcut key information in their menus.
Using a pen
From the UIQ application launcher, tap (once) on an icon that is not already selected. Your
pen tap first selects the item, highlighting its name, and then opens the application that it
represents. This behavior makes the user interface fast and easy to use, and is appropriate
on a device where the most commonly performed activities do not create or modify data.
In other Symbian OS pen-based GUIs, particularly ones in which creating or modifying data
are more common activities, this behavior may be modified so that a tap on an unselected
item only selects it; an item is only opened if you tap it when it is already selected.
In this case, two taps are required to both select and open an item, but this is not equivalent
to double-clicking with a mouse. When you double- click the mouse, the first click selects
and the second click opens, but only if it occurs within a certain time after the first click, and
if it's in the same place. This is easy to do with a mouse, but quite difficult with a pen.
Double-tapping can be made to work with a pen: Windows CE's GUI requires double-taps,
and uses them just like the desktop versions of Windows. However, since Symbian OS was
designed for pen use, it uses more natural idioms.