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I have started posting what I call "Mini-Tutorials" about the Icetips Utilities. The first one is up and is about the String class.

There is a lot of powerful stuff in the Icetips Utilities and we are far enough ahead into this product now that we can start showing people really how they can be used. The tutorials are not about how the classes work, but how you can use them. They demonstrate with simple code how to accomplish certain tasks, in this case for example how to quickly read and write text files without using the Clarion ASCII driver. Also how to export data to comma separated files and even XML.

We will be posting one tutorial every Monday so make sure that you check them out!

-- Arnor Baldvinsson

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We have made build 2352 available for download. This build includes mostly updates to the documentation - several more templates have been documented - and it also includes minor fixes to the ReadFileToString and WriteStringToFile methods that would report errors on the wrong api in some circumstances.

We are trying to get into a schedul or releasing something new every Monday but we hit an unexpected problem yesterday so we delayed the release until this morning!

-- Arnor Baldvinsson

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We have finished testing for the Beta 1 release of the Build Automator today and it will be made available to beta testers after the weekend. This beta includes a lot of fixes that I have been working on for the past several months. Details about the fixes and new features in this build will be publiesed on the Build Automator website after the weekend.

I also worked on a fix for XP Taskpanel which had refresh problems in Clarion 7 resulting in the taskpanel not drawing correctly. In my tests the fix worked without problems in Clarion 7 build 5332, but the customer reporting the problem was still having some problems with it. I will probably not get more information until after the weekend.

-- Arnor Baldvinsson

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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

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I stumbled on a really good deal on a HP LaserJet CP1215 color laser printer I had been looking at it at OfficeDepot and they had it for $199. I was looking it up on the HP website and they had it for a $99 special deal and free shipping so I jumped on it.

The printer arrived it last Saturday and tonight I finally got some time set it up. It was easy to set up. I connected it to my Vista 64 machine and there were no issues or problems and it prints just beautifully! I checked it couple of days after I bought it and it was back up to $299 and I see that they are now out of stock;)

It is rated 12ppm in Black only and 8ppm in color. We are starting to send out printed letters to our customers since we get close to 40% of our emails back with errors of one sort or the other, mostly because people have changed email addresses. So it is getting very difficult for us to keep in direct touch with our customers.

We have already sent out one mailing, about 3 weeks ago, and we got pretty good response so we are definitely going to be using this more and more in the future.

I have two excellent Epson photo printers, an older Epson 2200 workhorse and a more recent R-340. After comparing prices for ink and toner I realized that the difference wasn't much - if any - and the laser is faster and does a pretty good job - images and graphics look crips and details are excellent. Besides I would like to use my photo printers to print photos, which is what they were made for!

I will keep you updated on how this printer works in the long run, but so far it looks pretty impressive!

-- Arnor Baldvinsson

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It's been almost a month since the last time I posted! It took us much longer to get our office set up than we had expected. But we are back to work on our products and I'm planning a new release of our Icetips Utilities sometime in the first week of November.

Softvelocity released the Clarion 7 Application Generator to third party people about a week ago. I have worked in it just a little bit and I'm fairly impressed so far. What impresses me most is the dramatic increase in speed of loading the registry, loading the ABC classes and generating code. Compiling speed is probably about similar as it was in Clarion 6, but I haven't loaded any apps that are big enough to really be measurable:D

The new IDE will take some time to get used to and some areas definitely need some polishing, but so far so good. SV is hard at work on this and I'm looking forward to the next build:)

All the templates that I've registered - most of our product templates and several in-house templates - registered without any problems at all. The apps that I have opened so far have opened without problems. I've only tried to open some of the Clarion 6 example apps, but that's a good start.

In the coming days and weeks we will make sure that all our templates and classes compatible with Clarion 7 as well as creating new Clarion 7 compatible installs.

Dave Harms has written up a nice entry on Clarion Magazine about Clarion 7 and I suggest that you take a look at it. Dave has some nice comparison screenshots and more information so I'm not going to repeat it here. I also suggest you read the latest blogs on the Softvelocity website. I would particularly suggest that you read the blog entry about the "File Schema Pad" and watch the video about how it increases productivity. That thing alone will save hours for me every week and I'm sure I'm not alone!

-- Arnor Baldvinsson

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Well I didn't exactly get to write much while we were on our way! Our move to Port Angeles, Washington, went without a hitch. The 2600 mile (almost 4,200km) long drive was uneventful and we actually had pretty good time driving this long distance. It took us 5 days to drive from San Antonio to Port Angeles.

We did stop at the Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico on the way and I took some photos there that came out pretty good and I will be posting them later on my photo website at www.itakefotos.com. I also took some photos in the Mojave desert that I hope will come out as a set of nice panoramas.

Today we signed a contract to rent a beautiful home between Port Angeles and Sequim (pronounced like "Squim"). It is about 2000 square feet (200 square meters) with an excellent room for an office. Unfortunately we will not get internet connection there until Tuesday, September 30, so we will be mostly out of contact from tonight (September 26) until the 30th. I will be posting some photos of our house as well on itakefotos.com once we are all set up:)

We start moving in tomorrow morning and I'm hoping to have the office all set up by Monday so we can get back to work next week. We will still have some unpacking to do, but everything went pretty organized on the truck so it will not be that difficult to get things unpacked and reorganized. This house is actually a little bigger than the house we had in San Antonio, so it will be fairly easy to make everything fit into it. We expected to have to downsize so we should be very comfortable in this new home:)

We are very much looking forward to get a new start here and be able to serve our customers the best we can:)

-- Arnor Baldvinsson

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Our office will be closed from Monday, September 15 to Monday, September 29 2008 while we move from San Antonio, Texas to Port Angeles Washington.

We will try to be in internet connection on the way but that will only be in the mornings and evenings. I will try to help with any support issues that come up as much as I can. Our order processing will be open so you can still place orders, but anything that requires manual processing will only be processed in mornings and evenings. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

During the trip I will try to post a little bit on the blog to keep you all informed about what is happening and where we are:)

-- Arnor Baldvinsson

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I had really hoped to get this release out last week! As some of you know we are in the process of moving to Washington State and last week we had inspection and Thursday we got the contract for our house signed! We had a few things to fix and there isn't much time for us so I decided to get these things done. We all know what happens to the best plans of mice and men - they don't always work out;)

To cut a long story short, I finally got back to the Utilities this afternoon! I've been working on sorting out the install and creating a Build Automator project to do an automatic build.

One of the things I wanted to be able to do in the Build Automator project was to compile the help source into both the chm and pdf documents. This is easy to do with the Build Automator and I can now build both and set the build text variables in the Help and Manual project. I have also set the Build Automator project up to do a search and replace in all the source files once they are ready for deployment to put the build number in the souce. The demo apps will also include the same build number so now I can create a build and the version resources for all the deployed sources will always match!

Here is an example of a header from one of the class .clw files:

!! --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
!! Icetips Utilities Source file
!! %%COPYRIGHT%%
!! This file can not be distributed in any way by anyone except Icetips Creative, Inc.
!! %%VERSIONINFO%%
!! --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

When the text search and replace action is run on this it will replace the %%COPYRIGHT%% with "Copyright