Can it be done?

Rigght, I posted this question but it didn't appear for some reason. My question is that my friends and I have been thinking this from some time, and we want to make an application in VB 6 that is sort of like a virtual-phone complete with numberpad with numbers and alphabets on it, is it possible in VB6? Do not want anything drastic just something simpler. SOmething where you can save contacts and delete them add new just the basics. We're going for basic right now because we do not have a lot of experience working with graphics, and once we're done we will add other cool stuff to it that is if it's eve possible to do it. We've got an image of a real phone which will be the background image, and we were thinking if we could use multiple forms and when we press on new contact option it oesn't open a new window like in basic vb applications instead it appears on the same window (the screen portion of the phone but in our case white part of the image) and when you're done saving and it's closed you go back to the previous page instead of having two floating windows. We just thought we should ask before doing anything and wasting our time, wheather it is possible or not?

thank you so much, hopee this message appears on the forum, sorry about my english, I'm still learning it.

Function over form (GUI)... Will the application be used for actual phone calls? You'll need access to a server that interfaces the Internet with phone lines.

Oh no it's nothing fancy like that really, just a very simple and basic save contact application for computer only, that looks and works like a cellphone's save contact feature..

Hmm never dealt with GUI before so I'll have to check it out!

At work we have a virtual palm application, it does nothing fancy but I assume its the same idea.

Is this for a thesis? It can be done, yes.. but people (and your panel) can't help but wonder why you'll limit data entry to several keys when the keyboard's right there.

No not thesis or anything like that. My friends and I are doing this learner course to understand more about VB, here we get several lessons throught the duration and by the end in June we have to make application based on a scenario so our lecturer gave us a bunch of example that he said we could practice for final exam and learn how it's done etc etc, we've got many practice scenarios that he gave us and told us abou a site with mannnny practice questions to do on our own just to learn and help us for our major project, we decided we'll go from simple to complicated.. we practiced 2 already. rock paper scissor and another was guess a number, pretty easy but this one is a bit complicated.. Never done anything like it.. Well, I know what you mean but we're ging by what the question is aand in the question it says we have to assign letters to numberpad like cellphones. It will be like a practice for another that we want to try later on, it's a calculator but thats for later..

Might as well practice also, analysis/design based on narrative description/requirements.

Create a timer control array that corresponds to control array for 'keys' so they have one to one correspondence based on control array index. Set Tag property of all timers to 0. You will also setup a string array that contains characters for each 'key' and they also correspond through index value, eg. array(1) = "abc2" and is key(1) whose display value is 2. Note it's all zero based; key(0) has display value 1.

Whenever you click a 'key';
- disable its corresponding timer (even if already disabled),
- check value of Tag, if zero you will insert/append else replace character. You will maintain a boolean flag, eg. IsReplace = CBool(timer(index).Tag)
- increment timer Tag,
- check if timer(index).Tag exceeds Len(array(index)),
- - reset Tag to 1 if exceeds,
- retrieve character from array using Mid(array(index), timer(index).Tag),
- update message accordingly, insert/append or replace (based on flag IsReplace) and current position in message.
- and finally re-enable timer.

When timer expires reset its Tag to zero.

As to the other 'cellphone' keys, I'll let you figure it out. Also, implementation above does not support holding down a key as a number character shortcut.