Month: October 2009

1

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Several weeks ago someone in the Clarion world mentioned LogMeIn to me as a way to remote control your computers. So I downloaded and installed their freeware version of it on my laptop and the two desktop computers that I work on.

LogMeIn

On mornings like today, when the weather is cool and crips, it is very nice to be able to light a fire in our wood stove in the living room and park myself in front of it with my laptop and access my desktop computers. It works pretty well on our LAN (which is mostly 1GB, cat 6, but my laptop is obviously wireless) and it is free! I have not yet experimented with LogMeIn over the internet.

The only problem I have had is that when I connect to my laptop from the desktops, it tends to log off after a few mintues and I have to keep logging in. I'm not sure what that is about but I rarely need to use that so it is not a big deal.

You can run it in full screen or you can run it contained within the browser. The color dept can be determined but beaware that it actually changes the color dept on the machine you are connected to. The color dept is restored when you diconnect from it, but it might cause confusion if you look at the screen you are controling;)

All in all, definitely worth looking into if you need to remote control your computers. They also have Pro2 version and several other products that can be combined to create powerful remote control setup to control external computers and create VPN settings but those products are not free and generally require a monthly or an annual subscription.

Arnor Baldvinsson

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One of my customers contacted me couple of days ago to ask if it was possible to sort items in a drop button, when the items are created at runtime. Since the items are stored in a queue I figured it would be fairly easy. 

 Toolbar1.DeleteItems(ID1_Name)

 Toolbar1.AddDropItem(ID1_Name,'Arnor','ok_16.ico',1)
 Toolbar1.AddDropItem(ID1_Name,'Robert','ok_16.ico',2)
 Toolbar1.AddDropItem(ID1_Name,'Monica','ok_16.ico',3)
 Toolbar1.AddDropItem(ID1_Name,'Ana Maria','ok_16.ico',4)
 Toolbar1.AddDropItem(ID1_Name,'Ivan','ok_16.ico',5)

 Sort(Toolbar1.BandQ.ControlQ.pDropButton.ItemQ,|
      Toolbar1.BandQ.ControlQ.pDropButton.ItemQ.szTxt)
 !! Reset the ItemIDs after sorting the queue.
 Loop I# = 1 To Records(Toolbar1.BandQ.ControlQ.pDropButton.ItemQ)
   Get(Toolbar1.BandQ.ControlQ.pDropButton.ItemQ,I#)
   Toolbar1.BandQ.ControlQ.pDropButton.ItemQ.ItemID = I#
   Put(Toolbar1.BandQ.ControlQ.pDropButton.ItemQ)
 End
 Display()

Note that this will not work properly if you have separators in the drop items. If you want to do that, I would suggest to add the item text entries to a queue and sort them before you add them to the drop button. Something like this might work:

AddDropButtonItems         ROUTINE
 Data
Q   Queue
T     CString(256) !! Item text
SF    Byte         !! Separator Follows
    End
 Code
 Q.T = 'Arnor' ;     Q.SF = False; Add(Q)
 Q.T = 'Robert' ;    Q.SF = True;  Add(Q)
 Q.T = 'Monica' ;    Q.SF = False; Add(Q)
 Q.T = 'Ana Maria' ; Q.SF = False; Add(Q)
 Q.T = 'Ivan' ;      Q.SF = False; Add(Q)
 Sort(Q,Q.T)
 Toolbar1.DeleteItems(ID1_Name)
 Loop X# = 1 To Records(Q)
   Get(Q,X#)
   Toolbar1.AddDropItem(ID1_Name,Q.T,'ok_16.ico',1)
   If Q.SF = True !! Add Separator
     Toolbar1.AddDropItem(ID1_Name,'-','ok_16.ico',1)
   End
 End

 Display()

This should be able to handle sorted list with separators. I'm planning to add a method to sort the items alphabetically and I think I can make it handle the separators correctly too. The method I describe here is a bit more flexible as it gives you full control over how the items are arranged.

Arnor Baldvinsson

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On some of the XP-Theme product download pages it was stated that XP-Theme works with Clarion 5.5. This is not correct. When the source was moved up to Clarion 6.0 by PowerOffice there were quite a few modifications made to the code to make it thread safe in the new Clarion 6 threading model. Unfortunately this also made the code incompatible with Clarion 5.5.

Since it is seven and a half years since the last Clarion 5.5 build was released (May 29, 2002 according to my zip files) I will not be attempting to port the current product back to 5.5 compatibility.

I have updated the website and download information to reflect this and hopefully I found all the places it was mentioned. If you see somewhere that XP-Theme is compatible with Clarion 5.5, I would appreciate it if you would please let me know:)

Arnor Baldvinsson

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One of my customer asked how he could hide and unhide a band on a PowerToolbar on the application frame from a PowerToolbar button on his MDI window.

In order to do this you need to set up the MDI client template on the MDI window. PowerToolbar uses a global instance of the POToolbarGlobalClass to control the appframe toolbar from other threads. You can take a look at some of the methods in the online documentation.

The code you need to toggle the visibility of a band looks like this:

If AppToolbar.GetBandVisible(TB1_TestWindowBand) = True
    AppToolbar.SetBandVisible(TB1_TestWindowBand, False)
Else
    AppToolbar.SetBandVisible(TB1_TestWindowBand, True)
End

That is pretty much all there is to it. This is exactly the same code as you would use on the appframe itself.

Arnor Baldvinsson