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Support to my customers is one of the things that I have always wanted to make sure that I did to my best ability.

As our customer base has grown over the years this task has become more difficult. Since the support team is just I, myself and me it sometimes becomes a daunting task to keep track of emails and requests. Interestingly, customer support comes in waves. I may not get a single email for a week and then I get 10 in one day for as many products.

Having a good system in place has become one of my highest priorities in the past few months. Many developers feel that they have to design and write such systems themselves to make sure they work. I definitely used to be one of them, but I have started to learn that sometimes it's easier - and a whole lot cheaper - to use one of the many services out there rather than do it yourself.

Couple of months ago I mentioned this to Sue and she happened to have been reading some posts on her forums about options in customer support. One of them was Zendesk and after taking a good look at it I decided to try to use their service. But I got sidetracked by school and didn't get back to it until this week. I expect to have it completely set up sometime next week and once I'm done with that, emails will go out to all my customers about this new service and how to use it. Following that, subscribers will be added to the Zendesk account so they will have direct access. If people who are not my customers want to post question all you need to do is sign up and post. It's completely free and only takes a few seconds.

To access the Icetips portal at Zendesk, please go to http://icetips.zendesk.com I have not completely set up the end user portal yet as I have been working on the administration setup. Over the next week or so this page will change, but the support is fully functional by now. Over the next week I will send out emails to my customers with instructions and information about how to submit support requests.

I hope that with this new system in place I can keep a much better track of support requests and my customers can keep better track of what is going on.

Arnor Baldvinsson

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We have made Icetips Utilities build 1.2.2408 available for download This Utilties build includes quite a bit of documentation (about 50 pages total). The Page of Pages class has been documented and we added a control template to the Utilities so it is easy to add to your applications. Both the class and the template are fully documented. We also added a global template that allows the Utilities to be used in Legacy applications. I made some modifications to the String Class that affects the SplitString method. Note that our online (HTML) documentation for our products contains comment options using Facebook. This allows you to comment on any page in the documentation if you want to add examples or comments about specific methods or templates. We will be adding this to our HTML pages as we release new builds. Both the Utilities help and the PowerToolbar help now have Facebook comments at the bottom of every single page. For more detailed information about the updates and fixes please see the online documentation at http://www.icetips.com/manuals/utilities/version_history_2012.htm Documentation was completed for:

  • List procedures with Windows without HLP attribute.
  • Limit Program Instance template.
  • All Utilities templates.
  • Write Version info to INI file template.
  • Add Header Sort to Queue template.
  • Bind/Unbind local variables template.
  • Icetips Browse Checkbox update template.
  • Icetips ShowFileRecord wizard.
  • All Code templates.
  • Documentation reorganized so work better with both printed (PDF) and online (HTML) formats.
  • Every page in the online (HTML) documentation now has Facebook like and comment option at the bottom of the page.

Fixes:

  • ShowProgress in Progress class applied "vista fix" on XP also which could cause weird jumping in the progress bar.
  • SplitString could fail with last item in the item array.
  • Limit Program Instance template didn't preserve variables for entries (i.e. !Glo:VarName)
  • GetThemePanelFEQ returned the wrong FEQ.
  • ThemeAPanel didn't work in C8 and required XPTheme.

To download the latest build please go to http://www.icetips.com/downloadfile.php?FileID=192 You need to be logged on to download. Note that the installation keycode is displayed on the page and is also sent to you via email once you start the download. You can review the updates in the documentation at http://www.icetips.com/manuals/utilities/version_history_2012.htm

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Today is the last chance to use the icetips discount for the ISV Conference 2012 in Reno on July 13-15.

Use:

icetips2012

to register with 10% discount.

Today is also the last day to register for the conference for lower prices.

Today is also the last chance to reserve rooms at the hotel at about 50% discount from current rates!!!

Arnor Baldvinsson

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The Icetips Utilities build that was supposed to go out last Tuesday will not go out until tomorrow. I got on a really good roll with the documentation and decided to keep going while it lasts:)

While you wait, you may want to check out this link to Free Books at Microsoft press. They are all available as PDFs and some are also available as XPS, .mobi (Kindle) and .epub.

If you have a Kindle or Kindle Fire and you would like to convert the PDFs to .mobi for your Kindle, then download the MobiPocket Creator Publisher Edition from MobiPocket.com It will convert your PDF files to .mobi and in my experience they work much better than the free Kindle conversion at amazon.com. The MobiPocket Creator Publisher Edition is free and simply installs on your PC.

Arnor Baldvinsson

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I have made a quick update to PowerToolbar by releasing build 2.0.165. I got a report this morning that a message window was showing up when selecting an item from a DropButton. I checked and indeed there was a Message() statment in a method there that I had used for temporary debugging and not removed when I was done:( I very rarely use Message() but rather use OutputDebugString, which I use in a method that's called ODS in all my classes. So I routinely do a search for any uncommented ODS statements but I missed that Message() statement!

Arnor Baldvinsson

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I am very pleased to be able to give you a 10% discount coupon to the Independent Software Vendor Conference (ISVCon - http://www.isvcon.org) 2012 in Reno, Nevada. The conference will be held on July 13 - July 15 at the Atlantis Casino Resort. No time to waste, register now at http://www.isvcon.org/register.php

Don't miss out on this fantastic opportunity to learn about marketing and new exciting things for software vendors. Mix and mingle with the people in the industry and create new relationships for your business.

When registering please use the following coupon code:

icetips2012

Don't wait - register now at http://www.isvcon.org/register.php The coupon code is valid thru June 30.

My wife, Susan Pichotta, is the event manager for this conference and she is doing a terrific job at securing high profile speakers to come to the ISVCon. This includes people from Microsoft, MyCommerce (Digital River), BitsDuJour, Help+Manual, Avangate and several more. To review the sessions please check out the ISVCon Sessions at http://www.isvcon.org/sessions.php

The conference is held at the 4 star, newly renovated, Atlantis Casino Resort in Reno, Nevada.

The full conference with post conference "Monday meetup" session with other ISVs is only $475 until the end of June, then it goes up to $699, so register as soon as you can. There are two other options for the full conference without the "Monday meetup" for $425 and also just the weekend (Saturday and Sunday) for $375. Remember that you get 10% discount from those prices.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me or contact Sue directly

"I go to a lot of conferences and I have to say that the ISVCon (old SIC) really is my favorite. I look forward to it every year and it's hands-down the friendliest and most productive conference that I attend... I really got so much from the first SIC that I can't begin to list the ways that it helped my business."
-- Nico Westerdale - BitsDuJour

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We have made PowerToolbar build 2.0.163 available for download at http://www.icetips.com/downloadfile.php?FileID=190 For detailed information about changes in this build, please see the version history in the on-line documentation.

You need to have a valid Gold subscription or a valid PowerToolbar Solo subscription and be logged into your Icetips account to be able to download the new install. To purchase a Gold Subscription please go to http://www.icetips.com/subscribe-gold.php and to renew, please go to http://www.icetips.com/renewsubscription.php

The main update in this build is support for menu theming in Clarion 8. Clarion 7 changed the way Clarion constructs the menus which completely broke the menu theming in PowerToolbar. Fixing this was a major undertaking which among other things required us to re-construct the standard Windows menu since Clarion creates it dynamically so PowerToolbar does not have access to the Window menu item information at runtime. This has been in testing for several months and everything appears to work.

Another change is that now there is an option on the Advanced tab to delay the initialization of the PowerToolbar class. This was required in Clarion 7/8 to fix a problem where both Clarion and PowerToolbar drew the menu bar, resulting in two menu bars being drawn! If you check the "Delay Initialization" the initialization is moved to the OpenWindow event handler. Note that this CAN cause GPFs IF you have embedded code accessing the PowerToolbar class that executes before the PowerToolbar Init method.

While not directly related to PowerToolbar, the PowerToolbar on-line help now has an option for you to like and comment on each topic using a Facebook plug-in. This allows you and other users to comment on each topic if you have questions or tips! I will be adding this option to the documentation for our other tools as well in upcoming releases and probably on Icetips pages in general, particularly the article pages.

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We have made version 1.2.2406 of the Icetips Utilities available for download at http://www.icetips.com/downloadfile.php?FileID=189 See our forum post for more detailed information about this build and also the Youtube video below.

You need to have a valid Gold subscription and be logged into your Icetips account to be able to download the new install. To purchase a Gold Subscription please go to http://www.icetips.com/subscribe-gold.php and to renew, please go to http://www.icetips.com/renewsubscription.php

You can access the online in html format and you receive the chm and PDF files with the install.

I have made an almost 9 minute video available on Youtube about the new build, just click on it below to view it or visit our Youtube site

I expect to be pushing out new videos every week or every other week, depends on how things work out.

Hope you enjoy:)

Arnor Baldvinsson

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I apologize for the very long time without blog posts and a very quiet first quarter of 2012 from Icetips! No, it hasn't exactly been quiet time for us;)

After CIDC 2011 I spent quite a bit of time working on product updates that were subsequently sent out to beta testers. My goal was to start releasing new updates and couple of new products in mid to late January and was trying to get as much done as I could before I started pushing things out.

Well, that didn't quite work out as planned. Around the middle of January my main development computer started flaking out. At first it looked like the main drive was going bad, so I got a new drive. That looked like working until the day after I got it done, I could no longer boot the computer. At that point I couldn't get into the BIOS setup so I suspected the motherboard was dead. Decided to get a new motherboard and CPU for it. Got that set up and got Windows 7 installed on the new drive. Everything looked good. Installed the NVIDIA graphic card that I bought last summer and everything seemed to work fine, until about 10 minutes after Windows 7 booted, the monitors went blank and the computer turned off couple of minutes later. I replaced the video card and I finally had a working machine again