Tcl/tk for a Personal Digital Assistant

This paper reports on the experience of providing Tcl/Tk for the ParcTab, a personal digital assistant built at Xerox PARC. The primary reason for supporting an extension language like Tcl/Tk for a PDA is to supply the same platform-independent infrastructure for user interface design and communication between the PDA and remote applications. The result was that Tcl/Tk enabled rapid prototyping and customization of applications for the Tab, most of which were extensions and interfaces to existing non-Tab applications. In addition, by using a platform-independent extension language, interfaces designed in Tcl/Tk for the Tab are able to be reused on other platforms that provide a Tcl/Tk implementation. The paper starts with a discussion of the decisions made during the process of porting Tk to the ParcTab, which were focused on maintaining the natural look and feel of the Tk widgets while exploiting the small area of the display as much as possible; then includes a description of some applications that were enabled by Tcl/Tk on the ParcTab; and nally, presents a summary of some tradeoos available to the application designer for personal digital assistants with small displays.