Category: Icetips Products

Author Published on Leave a comment

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

Author Published on Leave a comment

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

Author Published on Leave a comment

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

Author Published on Leave a comment

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.

Author Published on Leave a comment

I have uploaded the latest builds of all our products. Taskpanel was already Clarion 7.3 compatible from an install earlier this month and was not updated now. All the other products now have a Clarion 7.3 compatible installer. I did not release any other changes to the products, except the Previewer, so if you have the latest build and don't need the 7.3 compatibility, you do not have to download this build.

The only change in the Previewer this time was a minor fix for the "Condition for use" option in the Legacy template chain which was not working correctly. It is now:)

For more information and download links to each of the new version, please visit our forum.

With these builds the total number of builds released this year for our subscribers climbs to 51! I'm hoping to get one more documentation update for the Icetips utilities out before the end of the year. In 2009 we released 24 new builds, 11 in 2008 and 21 in 2007. That is 107 builds since we started with our subscriptions in late July 2007.

As we are getting close to Christmas and we are getting busy with holiday stuff, Sue and I want to wish you all Merry Christmas and a very prosperous New Year:)

Arnor Baldvinsson and Susan Pichotta
Icetips Alta LLC

Author Published on Leave a comment

We have made version 2.0.143 of Icetips Taskpanel available for download at http://www.icetips.com/downloadfile.php?FileID=155.

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/renewsubscriptions.php

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

To read more about the Taskpanel update, please view my post on our forum Note that this install is the first of Clarion 7.3 compatible installs. We have tested all our installs and products under Clarion 7.3, as I blogged about earlier. We have just received a second Clarion 7.3 pre-release build which should fix the threading issue that we found when testing our Previewer demo! I will test it later today and expect to push out all the new builds for Clarion 7.3 tomorrow if no problems are found:)

This version of the Taskpanel changes a bit the way ampersands in headers and items are now shown. There was a problem with this in the older versions and since the ampersands made no sense as hot-keys, I have changed this so that ampersands are always shown exactly like they are entered into the headers and items. I.e. "Name & Address" will show up exactly like that. "Name && Address" will show up as "Name && Address". If this change causes issues, please let me know as soon as possible!

Arnor Baldvinsson

Author Published on Leave a comment

Last week I have tested all our products with the new Clarion 7.3 build. Everything is working nicely, except I stumbled on a thread dead-lock bug in the Clarion run-time library. Softvelocity reported to me Friday morning that this problem has been isolated and fixed for next build! It does not affect any of our products, but the Report Previewer demo demonstrated this dead-lock very well and it was 100% reproducible. I was also able to reproduce it with the People.app demo application Thursday and submitted that to Softvelocity and they have tested it with their new build with no problems at all! So I am confident that our 7.3 builds will have no problems at all:)

Since none of our products add any Clarion libraries, the DLL/LIB name changes in 7.3 do not affect any of our products.

I have updates for the PowerToolbar and Previewer ready to go, but decided to wait releasing them when Softvelocity announced that 7.3 pre-release was around the corner. I will release those updates in the next day or two as the public 7.3 release is probably some time away and I don't want to wait for it.

I'm planning to release a new build of the Utilities before the end of the month with documentation updates. Other products will be released as new features will be ready for release or when 7.3 is released to the public, then the new 7.3 compatible installs of all products will be made available!

Arnor Baldvinsson

Author Published on Leave a comment

Hi all,

We have made version 1.1.2392 of Icetips Utilities available for download at http://www.icetips.com/downloadfile.php?FileID=154

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/renewsubscriptions.php

This build is mostly documentation update, which is now up to even 400 pages in the PDF! You can access the documentation < href ="http://www.icetips.com/manuals/utilities/index.html" target="_blank">online in html format and you receive the chm and pdf files with the install.

To read more about the Utilities update, please view my post on our forum This build is the 40th build that we release this year!

I have new builds of the Previewer and Taskpanel that will be going out either this week or next. I had some issues reported last week that I felt like taking care of before I released new updates. That has been taken care of now:)

Clarion 7.3 is expected to be released this week to third party developers for testing. New install builds will be required to support Clarion 7.3 and that will put the number of builds issues by Icetips to over 50 in 2010! For a Gold Subscription renewal price, that gives you a new build for about $3.00!

Arnor Baldvinsson

Author Published on Leave a comment

Hi all,

It has been a while since I sent out new builds! In late September I got sick with pneumonia and was completely away from work for close to a month! Even after I got back to work I didn't have much energy so things have been moving very slowly. I'm not mostly back to normal and have been working to bring my backlog down a notch or two:) I have not written much on the blog either, but next week I will return back to writing regularly:)

We have made version 2.0.139 of Icetips Taskpanel available for download at http://www.icetips.com/downloadfile.php?FileID=152

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/renewsubscriptions.php

To read more about the Taskpanel update, please view my post on our forum This update includes a few fixes including a pesky bug with the tooltips on tasks for headers that were set visible or invisible at runtime - the tooltips were not refreshed properly which could cause major confusion!

Another change is that the product is no longer called XP-Taskpanel, rather Icetips Taskpanel. Since the product works with other operating systems than XP I felt the name was somewhat misleading. I'm sure there are still references to XP-Taskpanel somewhere that I have overlooked despite best efforts so please bear with us while we clean up the mess:)

There will be a new release of the Icetips Utilities later this month, mostly documentation updates. There will also be a new release of the Icetips Previewer shortly, probably next week with some minor updates.

Arnor Baldvinsson

Author Published on Leave a comment

Icetips Utilities build 1.1.2390 is available for download for all customers with a valid Gold Subscription.

This build contains complete documentation for the Date Class, File Search Class and INI Class. For more information please see the online manual and my blog entry from Sunday, September 5. Below is a detailed list of all updates and fixes in this build:

Updates, features:

  • July 2, 2010: Documentation done for File Search Class.
  • July 24, 2010: 22 new methods added to the Date Class: GetThisWeek, GetLastWeek, GetNextWeek, GetThisWorkWeek, GetLastWorkWeek, GetNextWorkWeek, GetThisMonth, GetLastMonth, GetNextMonth, GetThisQuarter, GetLastQuarter, GetNextQuarter, GetThisYear, GetLastYear, GetNextYear, GetLast12Months, GetMonthToDate, GetQuarterToDate, GetYearToDate, GetMonthFromDate, GetQuarterFromDate, GetYearFromDate. Documentation for Date Class updated.
  • July 24, 2010: Documentation done for Date Class.
  • July 28, 2010: 6 new methods added to the Date Class: DateDiff, DateAdd and GetDate to get date differences and SetWeekStartDay, GetWeekStartDay and GetWeekFirstDay that deal with different start day of a week. By default the week start day is set to Monday, but can now be set to any day. Documentation for Date Class also updated.
  • September 3, 2010: Added FreeFiles parameter to the ScanFiles method in the File Search Class. This allows the method to be called repeatedly for different folders or different wildcards without having to handle the files in the Files queue until all the files have been read.
  • September 3, 2010: Added attributes parameter to the FileExists method to Core Class. This allows the method to be used to find more than just FF_:Normal files, such as directories, hidden files etc.
  • September 6, 2010: Documentation done for INI Class.

Fixes:

  • July 21, 2010: HtmlToColor did only handle html color value strings that started with '#' Fixed so now it can handle html value colors without the '#' prefix. I.e. 'C1D8F0' instead of '#C1D8F0'
  • September 3, 2010: ScanFiles did not check if the path passed in ended with a backslash which caused an error. Fixed.
  • September 5, 2010: PROC attribute missing from SetFileAttrib method in Core Class. Fixed.

Arnor Baldvinsson