Category: Icetips Blog

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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

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Ever since we took over the PowerOffice tools in December of 2008 there has been a bug in the PowerToolbar that I had just about given up on ever finding. It was to a point that I have been considering pulling the product off the market if I couldn't find and fix this bug, because this was becoming more and more of an issue.

The problem would only manifest on Vista, Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7 machines. The code that themes the menus is different for XP and older operating systems and there is no problem. What happens in Vista and newer operating systems is that some menus were not themed at all and this would offset the settings so that icons would be out of sequence, some items wouldn't be themed correctly, menu items would disappear, text was missing etc.

Last week I decided to take this week and dig into this and either find it and fix it or basically give up on it and throw in the towel. This was the fourth time I dedicated a week or so of work to try to find this. I couldn't get going on this for real until Wednesday and spent Wednesday and Thursday tracking things. Yesterday, Friday, I had isolated the problem to what appeared to be the WM_DRAWITEM message not firing for some of the menu items and by last night I was completely confused. It made no sense that messages that fire when a menu item is drawn were not firing. No sense at all! So I decided to do the sensible thing and sleep on it!

When I got up this morning I had formed a bit of a battle plan and decided to start from the other end of things. Write code to track down the handles of the menus and then duplicate the steps that PowerToolbar takes in order to gather information about the menus and see if something went missing. My thought was that perhaps there was something in the menus that caused them not to be traversed by the API calls made to gather information about the menus, items and sub-menus.

I wrote a simple class that looped through the controls on the appframe window and put the menus and menu items into a queue. I then used GetMenuItemCount() to get the number of items in each menu as well as the handle (PROP:Handle) for each menu. I used OutputDebugString, my favorite method of debugging, to output the information into DebugView and then checked out each menu and the information. I started noticing a trend! Every menu that was not themed correctly had a negative value for the handle. I was on to something, but what?

After a lot of experimenting it was obvious that something was preventing the code from detecting the menus with negative handles and thus not theming them, setting everything off. I checked a couple of methods that gather information about the menus and menu items and also set the menu to be owner drawn. It didn't take long for one particular API to stand out: GetSubMenu(). It retrieves the handle of sub-menu from a menu handle and thus makes it possible to "walk" the menu structure using API calls.

But it wasn't the actual call to GetSubMenu() that was interesting, rather the check that came after it:

hSubMenu = PTB:GetSubMenu(hMenu, Pos-1)
If hSubMenu > 0 Then SELF.GetMenuInfo(hSubMenu, Feq).

Looks good to me! But when I carefully read the information about GetMenuInfo on MSDN I realized that the function returns 0 ONLY if it fails or if the handle is not returned. The handle can be negative and now everything came together in my head and I realized this was why it couldn't handle the negative handles - it would only recurse if the menu handle was a positive number greater than zero!.

The bottom line was that I had to add the "<" character in two places and the problem was solved. I changed the code above to: 

hSubMenu = PTB:GetSubMenu(hMenu, Pos-1)
If hSubMenu <> 0 Then SELF.GetMenuInfo(hSubMenu, Feq).

in two places and the problem disappeared! This is already out for beta testing and I hope to release this early next week! I feel very good about finally finding this and figuring out the fix.

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It's been quite a while since I sat down and wrote in the blog! Since early December I have been absolutely buried in work for a client, but I'm finally getting to the end of it. Should finish up with it this week and be able to re-group and see what's next on the agenda.

I wrote software for this client which they have been using for the past 5-6 years and they are now starting to lease it out to other companies in the same field. So we had to do some polishing on the program, make sure everything was compatible with Vista and Windows 7. Installers were improved and all binaries code signed. We also upgraded the application from SQL Anywhere 9.0.2 to 11.0.1.

This software was originally written by Sue between 1996 and 2000 using TPS files and ClaCom for transmitting data from remote users. When I started working on the SQL version of this software back in 2002 we decided to use Crystal Reports, but we found out later that it was next to impossible to deploy it, but it wasn't a big deal since they just bought the Standard Edition of Crystal Reports for the computers so it was not a big deal. Now it seems that it is impossible to get the Standard Edition so I set out to try to come up with a better solution and see if I could figure out how to deploy this. After some snooping around I found out that Crystal Reports Xi came with deploy-able merge modules and after some more research I found out that I could use Visual Studio 2010 to create an MSI installer with the merge modules. Testing showed that it worked perfectly so we deployed this new MSI installer. It adds about 40MB to the install, but everyone using this is on high speed internet connection so downloading 65MB install is not a problem.

We converted the new company to use the software two weeks ago and everything went smoothly except they had to use some old hardware for the database server as their new server had been delayed - once delivered last week it turned out to be defective so this is taking some extra time. There have been some minor issues that have come up, nothing major, but we have had to make some modifications to the program and the database after we deployed because this company operates a bit differently than my client's company. Dealing with outdated hardware has prompted us to decide that when we do this again we will buy a computer to set this up on and get it completely set up before we deliver it so that everything is working perfectly when we hand it over. This doesn't deal with a lot of data (accumulated total number of all records in all tables for both companies is < 100,000) As I mentioned, the software uses SQL Anywhere 11.0.1 and we use the Sybase Replication (dbremote) to transmit data from remote computers to a consolidated database via FTP server. The remote users are brokers that work remotely, transmitting trade orders to the back office where they are processed. We have been using Sybase replication since 2005 without a single problem, it just works, so this has worked perfectly for our application. I need to finish off a report and do an update for the new company and then I should be mostly done with this client for now, apart from regular maintenance:) I have several outstanding issues that I need to deal with in the tools from PowerOffice as well as new updates for Utilities and Build Automator. I will be starting to work on those again next week and hopefully I can get back on schedule with my products by the beginning of February. I appreciate the patience whle I have been going through an extremely busy period for the past 4-6 weeks! Arnor Baldvinsson

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Sue and I send you all our best wishes for Merry Christmas and Happy
Holidays this season:) May we all enjoy a prosperous New Year in 2011:)

Once I have posted this I am going to be out of the office until Tuesday, December 28. I will probably check my email couple of times over the long weekend, but don't expect speedy support;)

Thank you all for your business and support in 2010:)

Arnor Baldvinsson - Susan Pichotta
Icetips Alta LLC

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I use Skype quite a bit for all kinds of contact with clients and programmers and it has become part of my life. I just found out that it has been down all day, at least for me and millions of other users. Click here to read more about this problem on the Skype blog.

Here are couple of other links that have some more information:

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/12/22/skype-down-for-millions-of-users/

http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/tom-keating/skype/skype-down.asp

Hopefully they will get it back up again soon:)

Arnor Baldvinsson