It has been quite a while since I wrote on my blog and I'm planning on changing that! The past couple of months have just flown by!
I am right now finishing new Clarion 7 compatible installs for all of our Clarion third party products. So far everything is looking good and I should finish the new installs before Monday, April 13. I already have installs for PowerToolbar, XP TaskPanel, XP Themes, Outlookbar, Previewer, Utilities and Magic Buttons ready and tested. What is left is the Magic Locks, Magic Entries, Checkbox Fixer and SQL browse.
I am also getting close to beta testing of a new release of our Build Automator with a ton of fixes and updates.
Once those new installs are built and released I will be in a better position to release updates faster when new features are added or fixes are made. Every install is now built with the Build Automator and SetupBuilder 6.9. Some of the documentation for the older tools has got a bit out of sync and I will be working on getting that updated.
We are looking forward to the release of Clarion 7. While the new IDE takes some time getting used to and there is still a lot of polishing going on, it has some very nice and welcome features, such as a nice editor with code folding and all kinds of nice features. The IDE is much faster to load templates and classes than the old IDE. We have not found any major issues with it in our testing with our products.
There are, however, some limitations in some of our products. XPTheme is not needed in Clarion 7 since it themes all the controls that the XPTheme used to them. Several methods in the XPTheme classes are used by PowerToolbar so we modified the template to also work in C7 without implementing any theming. So far it seems to work fine. PowerToolbar cannot be used to theme the menus in Clarion 7 because it uses owner drawn menus and there is no way to turn them off. PowerToolbar does it's own owner drawn menus and they cannot work together with the Clarion 7 menus. So the menu theming in PowerToolbar is disabled in Clarion 7.
-- Arnor Baldvinsson
