What we at Icetips are doing
Amazon has opened its appstore at http://www.amazon.com/appstore To start with they have 3800 apps available there, not a lot compared to other places with hundred thousand plus applications, but it's a start. Just thought I'd let you know that now you can browse for apps for your phone when you get tired of looking for programming books;)
Arnor Baldvinsson
I have been called a Frugal Goddess by friends - my husband just calls me cheap. (Note, this is Arnor's wife writing!) Whatever you call it, I love saving a few dollars (gives me more to spend later).
This week at my favorite bargain software website, they are running specials on Outlook tools, all at 50% off.
Today, you can get SynchPST Professional, powerful software that lets you synchronize Outlook between multiple computers. I use this to sync my desktop and netbook computers. I use the desktop at the office Monday-Friday, sync the netbook Friday afternoon, then have the netbook at home to check email on the weekends. Monday morning, I run the sync again, and my desktop is current. Way, way cool. Highly recommended. $34.28 today, normally $69.95.
On Tuesday, you can get "NoMoreDupes for Outlook" for just $14.68. I don't have a problem with duplicate emails in Outlook, so I'm not interested in this, but if I did, I'd buy it.
Wednesday you can get "OutlookPrinter" for $14.68. I've thought about getting this, because I'm not really fond of the way Outlook formats emails for printing - but I print so few emails these days, I dunno. If I printed more emails, I'd definitely grab it.
Thursday is "TaskToCal" for Outlook. If you use Outlook tasks and want them displayed in your Outlook calendar, there you go. $14.68.
And last, on Friday, you can get "BackupOutlook" for (you guessed it!) $14.68. I'm going to grab this. While I do backup the Outlook files, my adventures in trying to copy them between one computer and another (before I bought SynchPST) taught me that Outlook is abysmally byzantine in the way it stores things. Arnor and I are both going to pick up a copy of this one. If we lost our Outlook database, or worse yet, had it but couldn't get to it because of missing some obscure config file, we'd just about shoot ourselves. I figure $15 is cheap insurance. 🙂
By the way, these tools are all from one software company, Wisco Computing, which is ran by Thomas Wetzel and based in Germany. I've met Thomas at various conferences - he is a nice guy, very responsible, and I trust his tools.
If you need Outlook stuff, check out BitsDuJour this week. But remember, the software is offered at these great discounts for only one day, so if you're a frugal geek, don't procrastinate. If you do procrastinate and miss the sales, you can always get the software from Wisco's website.
Susan Pichotta
When Clarion 7 came out we immediately found a problem with PowerToolbar as it was not able to theme the menus in Clarion 7 at all. The API calls that walked the menus to gather data about each item would invariably fail to extract the menu text from the menu handle. At first it sounded like Softvelocity would change this, but after a while it was obvious that it would not happen.
So I had to go digging for a different solution to this problem. And I am happy to report that I have found it! PowerToolbar is now completely capable of theming menus in Clarion 7 just like Clarion 6. It took a while to dig it up but I have come up with a solution and so far it is working perfectly!
Another problem with PowerToolbar was that it would not be able to use the original Office 2000, Office 2003 and Native XP themes to theme the menus and toolbars under Vista and Windows 7. The reason was a chunk of code that took an awful lot of time to execute and would simply not make the menus presentable because of how slow it was. I'm again happy to report that I have found what seems to be a perfect solution to this problem. I'm still testing this solution but so far it is looking very good!
I need to run some more comparison tests between XP and Vista/Win7 as well as Clarion 6 and Clarion 7, but I'm very optimistic that these two problems are now solved! This is the last bit of major issues that I have been tackling in my products and really hope that this is the end of it. I still need to do some clean up in the code etc. but I will be done testing this by the end of this week and will release a public PowerToolbar beta next week so those who are interested can start testing this.
Arnor Baldvinsson
When we took over the PowerOffice utilities in late 2008 we inherited a few problems. Problems that were intricate, complicated and seriously daunting to work on. So I kind of let them slip and ignored them for a while hoping that as I gained knowledge of the products and the code I would be able to figure these things out and fix them. At the same time I knew that I would not feel comfortable with these products until I fixed those problems and I would not feel good about promoting them!
In December last year I got extremely busy working on a project for one of my clients and had to kind of put these things on the back burner. When I finished that project in late January and I realized I was seriously behind my own schedule of releases I made a promise to myself to get those things fixed before I released new builds! If nothing serious comes up I will finish the fixes this week:)
The problems were in 3 products, Build Automator, PowerToolbar and XPTheme.
The problem in Build Automator was related to a random failure of the Copy/Paste option where it would fail badly and could even corrupt the project data. I knew the code works as it works almost all the time, but in rare occasions it will fail. I have never been able to duplicate it - it happens once in a while, I'd say perhaps 1% of the time I use it. After going through the code over and over again I realized there was a weak spot that could possibly cause this problem. I have plugged this vulnerability in a beta build that is out in testing now and I hope it will prove successful!
PowerToolbar had two problems. Firstly Menu theming was not possible when using PowerToolbar in Clarion 7. Clarion 7 uses owner drawn menus and in some cases those are known for not playing nicely with some API code that extracts information about the menu items. In my case it was the text that the API simply could not extract at all. I am currently working on a solution that is promising and I hope I will have it finished by the end of this week:) Secondly, PowerToolbar had a random problem with menus not being themed. This problem almost had me beat and it took multiple tries over the past two years to nail down the problem. As often, the problem proved to be very difficult to identify and very simple to fix! I wrote a blog entry about this fix just over a month ago and you can read more detailed description of it here.
XPTheme had one problem that was illusive and difficult to get to grips with. It had problems with list box headers, particularly when it came to groups, group headers and column headers for groups. It also had problems with scrolling the headers correctly if there were fixed columns and scrolling list boxes with the keyboard if the HSCROLL attribute was missing was not supported at all. For the past two months I have been working hard on fixing the issues with the list box headers and scrolling and it has been in tough beta testing now for the past month or so. I am very happy to report that for the past week I have not got any reports about any further problems:)
I expect that next week I will start pushing out new updates to those products. With those fixes I'm feeling comfortable again about promoting and selling my products and feel good about tackling any other problems that may come up!
Arnor Baldvinsson