Month: September 2011

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I had planned to write up blog entries as I was attending the conference, but that didn't quite work out! When I came home I had some work to attend to so I'm a bit late with this blog!

I only attended the conference, not the workshops. I had a table in the Solutions room, which was also where meals were served. The third party tables were lined up around the walls in the Solutions room and a lot of people came by my table to say hi and ask about our products. I really appreciate all the questions and feedback that I got and hope I was able to answer the questions:)

The first day, Monday, started out with Robert Zaunere's keynote speech. I was a bit disappointed with it as it detailed all the changes that have happened in Microsoft development tools in the past 20 years or so, that Clarion developers hadn't had to deal with. I was expecting more about what Softvelocity was doing and had planned for the future, rather than what Microsoft has changed or not changed. You can in fact watch the keynote speech and some other recordings at www.cidc2011.com or watch the keynote speech directly at http://nicetouch.adobeconnect.com/p6587t5e4a4/ Diego Borojovich went over changes, improvements, fixes and new features implemented in the Clarion 8 IDE compared to Clarion 7.

Softvelocity had three one and half hour sessions about the Clarion IDE, using Clarion.NET controls in Clarion 8 and using Clarion for web and mobile integration. I have to admit that none of those sessions were particularly fluent or interesting. I felt that Softvelocity was not well prepared. Many of the slides had a lot of typos and grammar errors and they looked a bit quick and dirty - not exactly what I was expecting. I certainly appreciate the work Softvelocity has put into Clarion 8 to make it a pretty good and stable environment, but their performance on Clarion.NET has been far from acceptable, in my opinion.

I only attended 4 sessions fully. Bruce Johnson's "The Road Not Taken" was interesting, particularly since it wasn't about Clarion at all;) It is always fun to listen to Bruce! Shawn Mason's talk, "Optimizing SQL in Clarion" was very good and I picked up a few things from him:) Andy Wilton's talk about "Using COM" was very interesting, particularly since he uses the Clarion OLE control for his COM programming. The generation and use of Interfaces to construct wrappers for COM has been pushed pretty hard and many people have completely dismissed using the OLE control. I watched about half of Mark Goldberg's session on "Understanding Classes/How to Clarionize API" which was very good. I wasn't going to miss Rick Martin's talk on his "SQL ODBC direct class" no matter what and it certainly didn't disappoint me!

The finish was Robert Zaunere talking about the future road-map, taking questions and wrapping things up. Softvelocity is planning to release Clarion.NET with the application generator in about one month. They are also planning a student license program and a demo version of Clarion and said those should be ready in about 3-4 weeks. A Clarion.NET add in code generator for Visual Studio is on the drawing board. Clarion will also be parking the "good" old WMF files for the print engine and going to EMF. WMF (Windows Metafile) format dates from 1990 and EMF (Enhanced Metafile) was first introduced in 1993, so neither is exactly new technology. EMF+ was introduced with Windows XP, released in 2001 so even that is 10 years old. WMF was supported in both 16 and 32bit, but I believe that EMF was only ever supported in 32bit. EMF+ supports GDI+ calls, where as EMF only supports GDI calls. Based on what I find, EMF does a better job at rendering some graphic components, such as curves and fonts so we might see better and sharper rendering of graphic elements and text.

I had a lot of people visit me in the Solutions room. I'm really bad about remembering names, so I'm not going to try, but I'm really grateful and appreciative of all the people who came and said hello! I had a great time meeting all of you. It got a bit crowded at times and I sincerely hope everybody was able to get my attention - I'm a bit hard of hearing and in a crowd it gets worse! If not, I apologize, and please drop me an email if you have any questions:)

I was staying at the Red Roof Inn, literally next door to the Rosen Center where the conference was. I saved almost 60% on that compared to the Rosen Center and since it was basically a room to sleep, I didn't really care, and the 3 minute walk back and forth was good and refreshing!

All in all it was a very good conference. I had hoped to get some more exciting information from Softvelocity during my stay, but we'll see how things progress in the next few months. It was absolutely fantastic to see all the people I have been corresponding with via email or on Skype for years and never been able to put a face to.

I want to end this by thanking John Hickey and Arnold Young for all the hard work that they put into making this conference a success! Their relentless work on the webinars and the two Clarion Live conferences is greatly appreciated by the Clarion community! Lisa Daugherty has also been helping John and Arnold with the webinars and was in charge of the registration desk at CIDC. Keep up the great work guys!

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Early tomorrow morning I'm leaving for CIDC 2011 in Orlando, Florida

I will have a third party table in the Solutions room and I expect to be at my table most of the time. Please drop by and register for free icons that we are giving away only at the conference! If you have any questions or comments, please stop by and talk to me. I have my laptop with me so I can check email but I may be a bit slow responding, depending on how things go.

I will be heading home Thursday morning but will probably not be in the office until Monday, October 3rd. I'm bringing my camera and hope to post some blogs while in Orlando:)

See you there!

Arnor Baldvinsson

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HTML5 has been in the news a lot this summer!

When Windows 8 was announced by Microsoft in May 2011, there was a very strong reaction from the developer community. The reason was that the announcement talked about using HTML5 and JavaScript to create applications for Windows 8. Many developers saw their world crumble. And predictions of doom were everywhere. They said Microsoft was going to abandon .NET and no legacy Win32 applications would be able to run on Windows 8, everything would have to be re-learned and re-written. What was missed was that while HTML5 and JavaScript can be used to develop new applications for Windows 8 - they are not necessarily a requirement!

I was a bit skeptical about the overwhelming visions of doom! I found it very unlikely that Microsoft would throw away millions of man-years of work invested in the .NET platform and support for Win32 applications. It simply didn't sound like a good business move. While Microsoft has certainly developed technology in the past that didn't last long and was soon overtaken by something else they invented, a lot of their stuff has stuck around for a long time. In the Clarion world we have come to love and hate DDE, which dates all the way back to Windows 2 which was released in 1987! It is still used in parts of the Windows Shell - I believe also in Windows 7, not sure about Windows 8. ODBC is another old technology that Microsoft used and while they were not the developers of it, without Windows supporting it, there wouldn't have been much ODBC going around for us:)

As Windows 8 progresses, it is getting clear that HTML5 and JavaScript are the new kids on the block - if you can call JavaScript new as it was developed by Netscape in 1995, then called LiveScript. You will still be able to create applications using your trusty development tools and they will still run on Windows 8. But if you want to get into the new Metro look and all the new fancy stuff in Windows 8, you need to take a good look at the development tools that Microsoft is already putting out.

Two days ago I blogged about Windows 8. There I included a link to the Windows 8 download page where you can download the latest Windows Developer Preview, which includes Visual Studio 11 Express. Visual Studio 11 is designed to create Windows 8 applications. Couple of days ago, Microsoft put up a page with First look at Visual Studio 11 Express. This page includes links to various other places, but for clarity I'm going to duplicate them here:

Tour of the IDE for JavaScript developers
Tour of the IDE for C#/C++/Visual Basic developers
Using the JavaScript project and item templates
What's New in Visual Studio 11
Getting started with Windows Metro style app development

One of the nice things about VS11 is that projects and solutions are backward compatible with VS2010. What I find interesting is that VS11 has quite a number of new features for C++. My personal guess is that C++ is still very much the core of Windows and some of those changes, such as AMP (Accelerated Massive Parallelism) was a feature added to help make touch as smooth as possible. It seems to be designed to speed up the data transfers between the CPU and the GPU using parallel data transfers.

But I'm getting sidetracked! I was talking about HTML5. You can now download Internet Explorer 10 with the Developer Preview and start playing with it. I suggest you check out Microsoft's Internet Explorer Blog as it has all sorts of information about Internet Explorer.

IE10 looks quite different from IE9. It doesn't even have an address bar! This allows the browser to become more of a website reader than a website navigator as we are used to in earlier IE versions.

I haven't had a chance to play with Windows 8, VS11 or IE10 yet. Had to work on a top-priority report for a Clarion client so I haven't had a chance to take a look but I plan on taking some time this week and load a virtual machine in VirtualBox and see how it works. I'm excited about all this new stuff, to see how we can help our customers move forward. Clarion will be our primary development tool for a long time to come, but if you have any questions or suggestions about our products and Windows 8, please let me know!

Arnor Baldvinsson

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I have been trying to figure out how one could work with a touch screen doing the work I, and I presume most of us, do.

I'm having a rather difficult time seeing how it will be done. I don't see myself and most other fast typists go to on-screen keyboards. I have one on my phone and I would not like to have to use it in real life. So if we are still going to use a keyboard, the most logical way for me to position the screen would be at an angle in front of me. But that would mean I'd have to travel quite a distance with my arm from the keyboard to the screen. Much more than the short distance to the mouse. If the screen was flat on the desk, it would require me to bend over to see it properly, causing neck strain.

I use sensitive wireless optical mice on all my computers. In fact, I use the same type of mouse on all my computers, the Microsoft Wireless Notebook Optical Mouse 4000. It has worked extremely well for me. I set the movement as fast as I can so I'm only moving the mouse about 1" to move the cursor across the monitor. This reduces strain on my wrists and since I started using those mice, I have had no problem with my wrists at all. I am concerned that using a touch screen, often at inconvenient angles, would cause strain on my wrists. I'd really hate to have to move my arm across my 25 and 26" monitors every time I wanted to move the cursor.

I like what I see about Windows 8 so far, but I don't think touch is practical for my work. I also don't think it's economical (it will slow me down) or ergonomic. I can see great use for touch in pads and phones, but I'm not seeing the practicality of it in desktop work. We will definitely see more and more pads in the very near future, but I think we will still be working with desktop computers for quite a while to come.

I recently saw a HP touch screen at Office Depot. One of the sales people showed it to me, and it looked great and was very cool. However, we were standing in front of it and the monitor was on a shelf, about 4.5 feet off the ground, so it was easy to access it. I don't see that position as being comfortable work position. It would not work for me at all because I have back problems that make standing for any extended periods of time quite painful.

I have used tablets for photography work and if the touch screens came with a good stylus and a decent resolution, that would definitely be an added bonus. But that would require that you could turn the touch off and only use the stylus as otherwise you would mess things up badly if you touched the screen, which would not work very well! I don't think I would feel comfortable with it flat on a desk and then having to bend over with my neck strained.

There are certainly times when I would like to have a touch monitor, but I think what I would do is I would have a small, 12-15" touch monitor flat on the desk and use it for stuff where I liked to use touch and then use a 2-3 large monitor setup for the rest of my work. Or - even preferably - have a pad that could double as an extra monitor. Now that would be COOL!:)

The verdict is far in the future. For now I'm just speculating and thinking out loud:)

Arnor Baldvinsson

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I have just uploaded a demo program for Icetips Outlookbar.

The install is about 1.7MB in size and contains a local compiled version of the Outlookbar Demo app as well as the help file (Outlookbar.chm) and the Outlookbar manual (Outlookbar.pdf)

Outlookbar is easy to use with a single global extension template and a control template you add to your window. It is compatible with Clarion 5.5 to 8.0 in both ABC and Legacy. It comes with a 56 page PDF manual and also includes help files in .hlp and .chm formats for easy look up.

Outlookbar is all Clarion code, no external dll or Active-x controls involved, just pure old Clarion code:) It is included in our Gold Subscription and now you can also buy it separately using the Solo subscription. For more information please check out out the Outlookbar product page and the Solo Subscription page.

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I'm sure you have heard that Windows 8 is in town. I have downloaded the full 64 bit Windows Developer Preview with Developer tools as well as the 32bit Windows Developer Preview without the developer tools to be able to check out both 64 and 32 bit as well as the developer tools.
The Developer tools edition includes Visual Studio 11 Express, Expression Blend 5 Developer Preview and 28 Metro style apps, including the apps from the BUILD conference.

You should stop by and watch the videos posted from the BUILD conference in Anaheim, California, where Windows 8 is being presented. This one shows nicely how the Metro interface works in a 93 minute presentation

You can download Windows 8 from http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/br229516 The downloads are ISO DVD images and the one for the full install with the Developer Tools requires a DVD-9 format, i.e. dual-layer DVD. So if you want to burn it to a DVD you need software and burner that can handle burning a dual-layer DVD.

In order to run Windows 8 it would be advisable to install it on a virtual machine rather than mess with creating separate partitions to install it on. VMWare users need to upgrade to VMWare Workstation version 8 in order to be able to install Windows 8. However, there is an alternative, an open source project called Virtual Box from Oracle. You can download it from http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads I have been using VMWare 6.5 for almost 3 years now and not had much complain about it, but VirtualBox has got some nice reviews, particularly about being noticeably faster than VMWare - I welcome any speed increase I can get! I plan to do some testing of VirtualBox and see how it holds up - expect a review or some posts about it soon.

PCWorld has put together a short tutorial on how to install Windows 8 Developer Preview on Virtual Box I plan to play with this a little bit over the weekend and get a feel for both VirtualBox and Windows 8. Can't wait to see how Windows 8 holds up.

Arnor Baldvinsson

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We at Icetips are happy to reveal some major changes in our website as well as in our subscriptions along with the re-release of our Xplore Browse Templates!

  • NEW! Icetips "Solo" Product Subscriptions
  • Re-release of Xplore Browse Template
  • Icetips website: Massive update
  • Arnor / Icetips at CIDC
  • Freebies


SOLO PRODUCT SUBSCRIPTIONS

You can now buy any Icetips product by itself, as a "Solo" subscription. The cost for each Solo Subscription is $99 for any Gold Subscription product and $49 for any Silver Subscription product. Included with each Solo Subscription is one year of support and updates, and low-cost renewal option at the end of a year. You can add Solo Subscriptions to your Gold or Silver Subscriptions at any time in case you need an additional licenses for a single product. You can mix Gold and Silver products any way you want. For example if you have a Silver Subscription you can purchase one or more Gold Solo products in addition. Each Solo Subscription has its own expiration date independent of any Gold or Silver Subscription you may have.

However, if you will use 3 or more Icetips products, you might save money by buying a Gold or Silver Subscription, rather than buying the products individually. Now, the choice is yours!

For more information about the Solo Subscriptions, please see http://www.icetips.com/solo-subscription.php

RE-RELEASE XPLORE BROWSE TEMPLATE

The Xplore Browse Template, an extension to standard ABC browses (now compatible with Clarion 7 and 8), has been updated and re-released. The Xplore Browse Template adds functionality to the standard ABC Clarion browse, including header-click sorting, on-the-fly filtering, hiding/unhiding columns, exporting, printing, and more. Documentation has been completely rewritten and is included as 65 page PDF and also in both CHM and .hlp formats. Documentation can also be accessed online at http://www.icetips.com/manuals/xplore/index.html if you want to check it out.

The Xplore Browse Template is included in your Icetips Gold & Silver Subscriptions, and is also available as a solo product subscription for just $49. For more information, please see http://www.icetips.com/xplore.php

ICETIPS WEBSITE: MASSIVE UPDATE

The Icetips website has a massive update, with the content and organization of every page updated and improved, and changes in the order processing, as well. The website's primary graphic elements have remained the same, such as the header and logo images, but there have been small graphic tweaks, like a shaded right column, enhanced login box, updated menu styling, new buttons, etc. You'll also see testimonials from happy customers showing up in the right column on some pages.

Order processing has undergone a few changes. Renewal processing has been completely automated, and renewals will be activated immediately. Build Automator licenses and Maintenance Plans are still processed manually and will be emailed to you separately. There are discounts easily available for multiple copy purchases of Gold Subscriptions (for multiple copy discounts on solo subscriptions, please contact us). And we have a new credit card processing company, FastSpring, whose modern system and fantastic support have helped us implement these changes.

Some of the biggest updates, though, are in the content. The Home page content is all new, we've added an About page, and all the Product pages have been completely rewritten and redesigned. They have better information, clearer organization and new, updated graphics. Most other pages have been redesigned to make them easier to use. The home page has a dynamic list of all the latest product releases and blog entries for an easy overview of what we are doing. Every page has a "Share" button where you can share comments about the page with your friends on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google, Yahoo and multiple other social media sites

Sue gets credit for all the designs but I worked on the programming. We hope the new website will work well for you and we appreciate any feedback you can give us! If you run into any problems with the website, please contact us as soon as possible!

ARNOR / ICETIPS AT CIDC

I will be in Orlando, Florida at CIDC, September 26-28. You should be able to find me at a table in the Solutions Room most of the time. I will be there to answer any questions you may have about Icetips products, help you with implementation, or just shoot the breeze. Please stop by and say hello.

FREEBIES

CIDC: We will have a special software freebie for CIDC attendees, so be sure and stop by the Icetips table in the Solutions Room to get your copy.

ANNIVERSARY PRESENT: Icetips' 10-year-anniversary of being in business is coming up at the end of this month. We wouldn't be here without our valued customers. To show our appreciation, we have a little something special for you! All Icetips customers should look for an email at the end of September with a little gift enclosed.

Arnor Baldvinsson

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Today on BitsDuJour - "True BoxShot" software with 60% discount! Sue uses this software and loves it! "Box shot software for lazy people" she calls it! It comes with a lot of nice images and backgrounds, plenty of nice font effects etc. I.e. it allows you to design the image, not just take a ready made image from PhotoShop and make it into a box shot.

They are also running a 60% special on "TBS Cover Editor"

Arnor Baldvinsson