Category: Icetips Products

Wow, what a roller coaster ride the last few weeks have been! In the beginning of December we reached an agreement with PowerOffice AS in Norway to take over development and sales of their 4 excellent Clarion third party products, Outlookbar, PowerToolbar, XP-Taskpanel and XP-Theme. We immediately started working on getting everything transferred to Icetips which meant changing template and code etc. We also changed the documentation to reflect the new ownership.

I decided to do a bit of a housecleaning on our templates and sources to try to standardize look and feel for all our templates. That also meant creating Build Automator projects for each install as I use the Build Automator to do search and replace operation on the source files after they have been copied to their final destination folders before building the install. This includes updating the version number, copyright notices and other information that can be build related.

Since C7 seemed to be close to come out into public beta with the application generator I decided to head for Clarion 7 installs. At first I started with separate installs, but then Friedrich posted some excellent code that helped me figure out how best to do this in a single install.

We also decided it was time to do some much needed spring cleaning on our website and Sue sat down and came up with the design of the new website. We are very proud of it and feel that is much more functional and much cleaner than the old site, which was banged together in a real hurry and kind of got stuck there. The site has been tested in Firefox 2 and 3, Internet Explorer 6 and 7, Opera and Safari.

Just before Christmas Softvelocity announced that Clarion 7 would be released into public beta before the holidays so we pushed really hard to try to get this done as soon as possible. I got all the installs ready and all the demos converted to Clarion 7. I ran into an issue with the menus in the PowerToolbar which simply cannot be used with Clarion 7 because Clarion 7 uses owner drawn menus, which are not compatible with PowerToolbar since it also uses owner drawn menus. The positive in that is that Clarion 7 seems to do a fairly good job of theming the menus so what I did was that if the template is in Clarion 7 it simply disables the menu theming in the PowerToolbar. XP-Themes will probably not make it into Clarion 7 since it's become redundant as Clarion 7 themes the controls that you previously needed XP-Theme to theme. But it can of course still be used in Clarion 6. Once we get some time to look into it, we will check to see if we can make XP-Theme play nicely with Clarion 7 and the existing themed controls in there. Who knows, maybe we will be able to bring this reliable, old friend forward.

All the installs, except for the XP-Theme install, now have Clarion 7 applications. I have tested them in Clarion 7 build 4542 and as far as I can tell, they all work identical to the Clarion 6 demos - with the exception of the PowerToolbar menus.

The Clarion 7 compatible installs for Outlookbar, PowerToolbar, XP-Taskpanel, XP-Theme and the Icetips Previewer are now ready to download. I'm working on getting the Magic Locks installs ready - ran into a weird issue with one of the demo windows when I was testing under Clarion 7. If nothing comes up we should have all our product installs ready for Clarion 7 by the end of the week.

The PowerOffice products have now become part of our Gold and Silver subscriptions. For the past 17 months or so we have offered 33% discount to previous Icetips customers and we are now extending that to all PowerOffice customers. This discount will end on January 23, 2009.

We hope that the New Year of 2009 will bring us all prosperity and well being. We thank all our customers for the support in the year 2008 and hope we will be able to provide you with good value for your hard earned money in the New Year.

Happy New Year

-- Arnor Baldvinsson

We have made version 1.1.2316 of the Icetips Utilities available for download.

You can now view the documentation online to see what has been updated. You must have a valid Gold Subscription and be logged in to your Icetips Account in order to be able to download the new build. To download please go to our download page

If you purchase or renew your Gold Subscription before it expires you will also receive the free copy of our new Build Automator with a 1 year Maintenance Plan. Renewing the Gold Subscription is only $149!

This release includes all new work that we have added to the product, but it is mostly a documentation update. The Core class documentation is complete and we will keep working on the documentation until it's done. We include a separate demo for the Core class and we will continue with that trend, i.e. to include separate demos for each class as we document them. Demos and classes have been tested on a clean Clarion 6.3 9059 install and also with builds 9058 and 9053.

We are planning a new release next week with more documentation updates and more demos. We will be tackling the WindowsClass next which is the largest class. It is mostly documented and we have a good start for a demo app so we should not have a problem getting that done in the next few days - we have already started working on it:)

If you are using our Build Automator you might be interested in a new example that we have made available for download which is the script that we use to build the Icetips Utilities install. It shows how you can use the Build Automator features to completely control version information in your sources, apps, documentation and installs!

We are moving!
As you may know we are moving from San Antonio, Texas to Port Angeles, Washington. We already have a contract on our house and closing date is set on September 15. If nothing comes up to delay this we will be leaving on September 17. We will be about a week on the road and from September 15 to September 28 our office will be closed during that time. We will still have access to our email and be able to access the internet as we move along, but response time will be somewhat slower than normal.

Because of this we do not want to release anything new in the last week before we move so we will not be releasing any new builds between September 10 and September 30. If we need to fix something we may kick out a new fix build, but we will not introduce any new code. We will still keep working on the documentation and expect to do releases soon after we arrive.

Once we are settled we will keep working on the Utilities documentation and demo apps. We are also starting design of browser extensions that will replace the old Xplore templates and classes. If you have ideas, please let us know! You can post on our Ideas forum if you have any ideas for any of our products or ideas for new products.

Arnor Baldvinsson

August 2008

Icetips Utilities
In the next two weeks we are planning at least one release of the Icetips Utilities but there could be two. The first one will include new source files and updates to the documentation.

The second release will include more documentation updates and a new Clarion class that we developed for the Build Automator. This second build should also include some new templates including a template for global hotkeys.

We are also working on what we call the Icetips Core Library which is a growing library of functions written in Visual C++ and compiled into a dll. This is kind of our own runtime library where we will put functions that make sense to do in C rather than Clarion for various reasons, one for example is that we do not need to worry about prototypes or structures or stuff like that because that is all included.

Icetips Password Manager
This is a cool little tool that we have been using for a while. While not strictly a developer tool, it certainly helps keep track of all those logins and urls that we use every day to do our business. Certainly something that developers use like everybody else! We will release this tool into both subscriptions next week (August 18 - 23) and hope you will find it as useful as we do!

September 2008
As we get closer to September we will post more details about what we will be working on next month and when to expect new releases. There will also be a beta release of a brand new dictionary tool (we don't have a name for it yet!) that has been in the pipelines for quite a while. We expect to release that product in October.

There will be a new build of the Build Automator released sometime in September, probably closer to the end of September. It will include a new action to compile installs created with InstallAware and an action to delete registry keys. We have several other actions that we would like to add, but we have not decided yet exactly which ones will be in the September update.

-- Arnor Baldvinsson