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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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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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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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I have been called a Frugal Goddess by friends - my husband just calls me cheap. (Note, this is Arnor's wife writing!) Whatever you call it, I love saving a few dollars (gives me more to spend later).

This week at my favorite bargain software website, they are running specials on Outlook tools, all at 50% off.

Today, you can get SynchPST Professional, powerful software that lets you synchronize Outlook between multiple computers. I use this to sync my desktop and netbook computers. I use the desktop at the office Monday-Friday, sync the netbook Friday afternoon, then have the netbook at home to check email on the weekends. Monday morning, I run the sync again, and my desktop is current. Way, way cool. Highly recommended. $34.28 today, normally $69.95.

On Tuesday, you can get "NoMoreDupes for Outlook" for just $14.68. I don't have a problem with duplicate emails in Outlook, so I'm not interested in this, but if I did, I'd buy it.

Wednesday you can get "OutlookPrinter" for $14.68. I've thought about getting this, because I'm not really fond of the way Outlook formats emails for printing - but I print so few emails these days, I dunno. If I printed more emails, I'd definitely grab it.

Thursday is "TaskToCal" for Outlook. If you use Outlook tasks and want them displayed in your Outlook calendar, there you go. $14.68.

And last, on Friday, you can get "BackupOutlook" for (you guessed it!) $14.68. I'm going to grab this. While I do backup the Outlook files, my adventures in trying to copy them between one computer and another (before I bought SynchPST) taught me that Outlook is abysmally byzantine in the way it stores things. Arnor and I are both going to pick up a copy of this one. If we lost our Outlook database, or worse yet, had it but couldn't get to it because of missing some obscure config file, we'd just about shoot ourselves. I figure $15 is cheap insurance. 🙂

By the way, these tools are all from one software company, Wisco Computing, which is ran by Thomas Wetzel and based in Germany. I've met Thomas at various conferences - he is a nice guy, very responsible, and I trust his tools.

If you need Outlook stuff, check out BitsDuJour this week. But remember, the software is offered at these great discounts for only one day, so if you're a frugal geek, don't procrastinate. If you do procrastinate and miss the sales, you can always get the software from Wisco's website.

Susan Pichotta

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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