Palette as a stack or sub-stack, and a mouseUp/mouseStillDown question

[Silver, Jason]

Hello everyone,

I think I'm becoming a regular poster to this mailing list!  :)
Anyways, I've got a question regarding how I'm setting up the
architecture of my program, and then a button question.

Up until now, I've had a stack "Screen", which is simulating the screens
of our company's would-be handset.  When I first was playing around in
Revolution, the stack contained a display and lots of buttons, much like
a usual mobile phone.  However, to simplify screen creation, I made the
stack "Screen" only 240x320 (the size of  the actual screen), so it
would be easy to place icons and fields in exactly the same position as
they would be on the real phone.  I thought that I would control the
screen with particular keyboard presses (e.g. "S" for the Send key, "E"
for the end key, etc.)

At this point, I think it's going to be easier to make buttons to
navigate the interface, because we'd also like to be able to type into
specific fields using the keyboard.  So, I've created a sub-stack called
"Handset Buttons", and I've made it a palette.  Am I heading down the
right road, or is it better to have the palette in a separate stack?

To give some context, once the user presses a button on the palette,
such as "Send", the "Screen" stack will be jumping to a particular card
(and this can change, depending on what field is highlighted on the
current card).  Imagine highlighting an particular menu item on your
mobile phone and pressing select; the next screen is entirely dependent
on what line you're highlighting.  When I'm in fields on the "Screen"
stack, how do I monitor which buttons are pressed on the "Handset
Buttons" sub-stack?

The situation is further complicated by certain buttons I want to have
on the palette that will do two different things, depending on whether
you're short-pressing the button, or pressing and holding the button.
It seems logical to have a long-press on the phone map to a
"mouseStillDown" message in Revolution.  However, I want to make sure
that when there's a long press of a button, that the "mouseUp" message
is NOT sent afterwards.  So, the mouseUp of a button is the short-press,
and the mouseStillDown is the long-press (that doesn't do the
short-press as well).  Is this accomplish by message sending or passing?
Or am I completely off-base?

Phew, I think that explains everything I'm dealing with at the moment.
I wanted to thank all of you again for getting a newbie like myself off
the ground with Revolution and the Transcript language.  Your help has
proven invaluable!

Jason Silver
Human Factors Engineer, Sr.
QUALCOMM Inc.
jsilver at qualcomm.com