Wow, what a roller coaster ride the last few weeks have been! In the beginning of December we reached an agreement with PowerOffice AS in Norway to take over development and sales of their 4 excellent Clarion third party products, Outlookbar, PowerToolbar, XP-Taskpanel and XP-Theme. We immediately started working on getting everything transferred to Icetips which meant changing template and code etc. We also changed the documentation to reflect the new ownership.
I decided to do a bit of a housecleaning on our templates and sources to try to standardize look and feel for all our templates. That also meant creating Build Automator projects for each install as I use the Build Automator to do search and replace operation on the source files after they have been copied to their final destination folders before building the install. This includes updating the version number, copyright notices and other information that can be build related.
Since C7 seemed to be close to come out into public beta with the application generator I decided to head for Clarion 7 installs. At first I started with separate installs, but then Friedrich posted some excellent code that helped me figure out how best to do this in a single install.
We also decided it was time to do some much needed spring cleaning on our website and Sue sat down and came up with the design of the new website. We are very proud of it and feel that is much more functional and much cleaner than the old site, which was banged together in a real hurry and kind of got stuck there. The site has been tested in Firefox 2 and 3, Internet Explorer 6 and 7, Opera and Safari.
Just before Christmas Softvelocity announced that Clarion 7 would be released into public beta before the holidays so we pushed really hard to try to get this done as soon as possible. I got all the installs ready and all the demos converted to Clarion 7. I ran into an issue with the menus in the PowerToolbar which simply cannot be used with Clarion 7 because Clarion 7 uses owner drawn menus, which are not compatible with PowerToolbar since it also uses owner drawn menus. The positive in that is that Clarion 7 seems to do a fairly good job of theming the menus so what I did was that if the template is in Clarion 7 it simply disables the menu theming in the PowerToolbar. XP-Themes will probably not make it into Clarion 7 since it's become redundant as Clarion 7 themes the controls that you previously needed XP-Theme to theme. But it can of course still be used in Clarion 6. Once we get some time to look into it, we will check to see if we can make XP-Theme play nicely with Clarion 7 and the existing themed controls in there. Who knows, maybe we will be able to bring this reliable, old friend forward.
All the installs, except for the XP-Theme install, now have Clarion 7 applications. I have tested them in Clarion 7 build 4542 and as far as I can tell, they all work identical to the Clarion 6 demos - with the exception of the PowerToolbar menus.
The Clarion 7 compatible installs for Outlookbar, PowerToolbar, XP-Taskpanel, XP-Theme and the Icetips Previewer are now ready to download. I'm working on getting the Magic Locks installs ready - ran into a weird issue with one of the demo windows when I was testing under Clarion 7. If nothing comes up we should have all our product installs ready for Clarion 7 by the end of the week.
The PowerOffice products have now become part of our Gold and Silver subscriptions. For the past 17 months or so we have offered 33% discount to previous Icetips customers and we are now extending that to all PowerOffice customers. This discount will end on January 23, 2009.
We hope that the New Year of 2009 will bring us all prosperity and well being. We thank all our customers for the support in the year 2008 and hope we will be able to provide you with good value for your hard earned money in the New Year.
Happy New Year
-- Arnor Baldvinsson
