The Smartphone MenuBar is a simplified version of the MenuBar control used by the Pocket PC. Because the Smartphone lacks a touch screen, the user interacts with the Smartphone MenuBar using two buttons at the base of the screen. The two buttons are aligned with the two possible buttons on the control. The buttons can either be implemented to display a menu or to perform an action directly.

As I mentioned earlier, when a menu is displayed, the first 10 items on the menu are automatically prefixed with a number from 1 through 9 and then 0 corresponding to the 10 digits on the phone keyboard. When the menu is displayed the user can easily select an item by pressing a key on the phone. With the automatic addition of the menu item numbers, there's no reason to specify underlined navigation characters in the menu items.

While it's possible to put more than 10 items on a menu, the small size of the phone necessitates that the menu scroll, which isn't a very friendly interface design. Another less than friendly interface design is cascaded menus. The Smartphone MenuBar control does support cascaded menus, but the extra level of action required by the user causes more work than a cascaded menu provides benefits.

This topic is from Programming Microsoft Windows CE, Third Edition, by Douglas Boling, published by Microsoft Press. © 2003 by Douglas McConnaughey Boling. Reprinted here by permission of the author.