What we at Icetips are doing
We will be out of the office for the next couple of weeks or so. We are helping our daughter move. We will be driving a lot and may not have a good internet connection most of the time, so please be patient with us getting back to you 🙂
If you need support, please use our support popup on the website or email us at support at icetips.com.
There was some discussion on comp.lang.clarion last week about performance of REMOVE in terms of removing the page metafiles when a report closes. The previewer uses the same method for removing the metafiles. We have released a new build that uses windows API rather than Clarion REMOVE function to remove the files. This should help with performance when closing large reports.
Please let us know if you experience any problems with this.
I discovered today that our hosting company had updated PHP on icetips.com. If they let us know it did not register with us. The new PHP removed some of the old database functions that were used in various places and thus the site was completely blank this morning!
I have got most of it functioning again and will get the rest updated tomorrow, March 2nd. I apologize for any problems this may have caused. Our email and all other services were working without problems.
One thing that will take me a few more days is to get the article search back up. It was using a very old version of Code Charge code (probably close to 20 years old) that is also not compatible and I'm switching it over to using DataTables. I have been using that library with very good results in development for a client. Hopefully, I will have this all up and running in a couple of days!
Clarion 11 builds are getting closer and I hope to have them all sorted this weekend and push them out next week, starting Monday, October 1st.
One of the changes in Clarion 11 is in the template interface. After many years it has finally happened - the template window has been widened! That presented a bit of a problem with the presentation as now we have two distinct visual designs - one for Clarion 11 and later and one for Clarion 10 and older. The old format we have grown accustomed to over the past 25 years without much change still looks like it always has.
The new template window is considerably wider and fits much better with today's large and high resolution monitors.
Some of our template windows will be updated to take advantage of the added real estate, but I'm not sure if that will all be included in the initial builds for Clarion 11.
One change that will be across all our products - the version number will change to be year.month.build. That will help immediately identify the release time of the template to help with support. As always the version numbers and support information will keep being included on every template window.
Another change that is coming is that by the end of this year we will no longer test or support backward compatibility with the old 16bit Clarion IDE. I have to maintain several 32bit Windows virtual machines, which gets to be quite expensive and the 3GB memory limitation in 32bit operating systems doesn't leave much room for the new IDE along with other development tools. So after January 1st, 2019 we hope to have all demo apps etc. upgraded to Clarion 9 or 10 only and the last builds of 2018 will be the last builds that support Clarion 6 and older. We may leave the installers to support the older IDE for now, but we will no longer support the old IDE. Clarion 6.3.9059 was released in early 2009 and I think 10 years is a pretty good run for a development environment. Time to move on 🙂
We have released Build Automator 2015 build 5.12.1344
The full install can be downloaded from the Build Automator website at http://www.buildautomator.com/download.php or by using the "Check for Updates" option under the Help menu in the program.
There are several new features in this build, but there are also a lot of fixes behind the scene that make the program more stable than it has ever been. The new feature list includes:
But the main change is that Build Automator 2015 is completely built in Clarion 10. We had decided that Build Automator 2014 would be the last build we did in Clarion 6.3. It had served us well, but it really was time to move on.
It was not a pain free move! Clarion 9.1 would consistently throw a non-descript "internal compiler error" on one of our classes and no matter what I did, it would never compile that particular code file. Clarion 10 came around and lo and behold it would compile this particular file with no issues. So on went the conversion process. I found a few bugs along the way, both in Clarion and Build Automator! Window resizing changed between Clarion 6.3 and Clarion 10 - don't know when - and it caused problems with most of the action windows causing quite a bit of work to get around that.
I would have liked to have more new actions and features in this build, but it has taken so long to get it together that I didn't want to wait any longer! But with Build Automator now in Clarion 10 it will be much easier to dive back in and get some new things going.
FTP and Email are two of the things that I want to add and improve. Currently you can only upload files, not download or do any other fancy stuff. It would also be nice to be able to send emails from it in case of errors and attach the log file. Version control is another thing that needs better support. Although I have implemented TortoiseSVN using "Run Program" and it runs great, it would be nice to have a more native support for the most popular version control programs today.
Our support for Clarion 6 is coming to an end. While the actions to compile with the old IDE will stay in the Build Automator IDE there will be no further development on them. One of the features I want to add is more flexibility in the MSBuild action, so that it could for example be used to build multiple solutions or multiple projects, in a similar way as the "Compile Multiple Clarion Applications" where there is a list of items to compile.
Arnor Baldvinsson
Yesterday I uploaded some changes to the Icetips website that I hope will help make the site more accessible. I'm working on a redesign that will be fully responsive, but that's going to take some time to complete.
We have changed the basic fonts so text is now more open and there is more white-space on the pages. Colors have changed as well and the site as a whole is a bit brighter. All the product pages now have tabs where there is information about features, compatibility, downloads and screenshots.
I have also added a "Version History" tab to 5 products, Utilities, Previewer, Outlookbar, Powertoolbar and Taskpanel. The version history for the rest of the products will be up there soon and I will keep this updated as new releases are made.
The login page also has tabs with the latest downloads, blog entries and your profile, so it's easy to get to it all on one page.
For those of you in the US, I wish you all a happy 4th of July tomorrow:)
Arnor Baldvinsson