Author: Arnor

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For a while now we have had pages on both Twitter and Facebook. They are connected so each feeds the other so you don't need to connect to both. From time to time I post small tidbits of news that I gather from various online publications, newsletters etc. that may be very helpful for you - or not helpful at all, as the case may be - you never know:) I'm fairly active on Facebook, so I'd be very happy if you peeked at our page and liked it or shared it:)

You can reach us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/#!/icetips and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/pages/Icetips-Alta-LLC/177947342793

Arnor Baldvinsson

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Tuesday June 14, 2011 we released Build Automator version 1.70.1277. This is the ninth and LAST beta build we are releasing for version 2.0, which will be out in about two weeks. Just documentation and some minor polishing is needed and if any issues are found in this beta they will be fixed as soon as possible.

For more information please visit our Build Automator Blog Site

Arnor Baldvinsson

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Out of milk is one of those apps that you can't understand how you lived without!!! It was one of the first apps that I got for my phone. Now I don't know how I could function without it! One of my favorite features is the ability to use the camera in the phone to scan bar codes on products to get them into the shopping list. So far it has pulled about 90 percent out of its database. It also has a to-do list and a pantry list, but I haven't used either of those much so I can't comment on those features. But I would strongly recommend that you check it out for yourself:-)
At $ 4.99 it's not free, but to me it has been worth every single cent!

Arnor Baldvinsson

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During a skype discussion this application, PC Monitor, came up and I thought I would share this with you. Please visit http://www.mobilepcmonitor.com/ for the product website.

PC Monitor is a an application for your iPhone, Android or Windows Phone 7, that can monitor computers running Windows, Linux or Mac OS. It is free for up to 5 computers and for more than 5 computers you can buy annual subscriptions that start at US$ 49.95 for up to 10 computers and US$299 for up to 100 computers.

If you monitor or manage computers, then this is definitely an app you should take a look at. I can also see this app used as a safety device to monitor computers in an office or at home when you are not at the same location as the computers.

You can also send commands to the computers you monitor and get notifications when something happens on the computer, such as when the computer is rebooted, low on battery, when user logs in or out, etc.

Arnor Baldvinsson

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Every now and then I do a "File | Save as" in C6 to clean out the gunk that Clarion collects in the apps from time to time. Been working on a fairly large app with a lot of browses and forms in it and today after adding a browse/form to it and doing some work the IDE crashed. Been working in this VM for probably 2 weeks or more without rebooting it (and Clarion 6.3 has been running that whole time) and decided it was time to do this trick again. The app file went from 7.8MB to 5.8MB! Now it loads much faster and generates faster also:) I don't know if this still applies in C7/C8 but wouldn't be surprised if it did. If you are not doing this regularly or semi-regularly to apps that you are working on a lot, your apps are collecting gunk that does nothing but slow Clarion - and you - down! It's simple:

1. Open your app

2. Use "File | Save As" to save it to a new name (I use appnameX.app)

3. CLOSE the app. This is an important step I have found.

4. Move the original app (appname.app) out of the folder for
backup IN CASE something fails (it has never failed for me, but you never know!)

5. Open the appnameX.app

6. Use "File | Save As" to save it back to the original name.

7. Keep going:)

I try to do this like once a month or so, depending on how much I work in the apps. After I posted this I received word from one guy who did this to his app and it went from 15MB to 1MB!!!)

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All our products are now available with Clarion 8 compatible installs except XPTheme. IF you need XPTheme with your project, just copy files from C7 or C6 if you are using Powertoolbar. I'm still hunting down one bug in the list box header in XPTheme and will release a new update when I've got that nailed, but no later than Friday, May 6.

Emails will be going out to customer in couple of hours with direct download links:) If you run into any problems please let me know as soon as possible! This has got very minimal testing in Clarion 8 so please let me know if you have any problems!!!

Arnor Baldvinsson

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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

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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

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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