Chapter 1

Epoc file: Hellogui.mbm
Bitmap file 1 : icon.bmp
Bitmap file 2 : icon2.bmp
Bitmap file 3 : iconmask.bmp
Bitmap file 4 : icon2mask.bmp
Success.
To extract .bmp files from a multibitmap file you specify a /u flag after the bmconv
command, for example:
bmconv /u Hellogui.mbm icon.bmp icon2.bmp iconmask.bmp icon2mask.bmp
One useful application of this facility is to capture a screen from the emulator using
Ctrl+Alt+Shift+S. This results in a .mbm file containing a single entry. Once you have
extracted the bitmap, you can display and manipulate it using an editor such as Paint Shop
Pro.
You can also view the contents of a .mbm file by specifying a /v flag after the command:
bmconv /v Hellogui.mbm
To see the full set of supported options, just type bmconv on the command line.
14.2 Adding Application Icons
Now that we've seen how to handle bitmap and resource conversion for adding buttons to a
button bar, we can generate an application icon and a better caption for HelloGUI, to be
visible from the Application Launcher of your UIQ smartphone.
Here is what the application icon will appear as in Figure 14.5.
Figure 14.5
As we saw in Chapter 13, the icon and caption, along with some other information about an
application's capabilities are contained in an application information file or AIF. Without an
AIF, the application uses the default system icon (consisting of two squares on a gray
background with a black border), displays a caption identical to its filename, and is assumed
not to be associated with any MIME file types. The AIF has the same name as the
application, and resides in the same directory – unsurprisingly, its extension is .aif.
An AIF is created with the aid of aiftool.exe and the two main ways of using it are:
� using aiftool as part of the application build process, by adding a statement to the
project specification file, as we did with .mbm files earlier
� using aiftool directly.