Author Published on Leave a comment

Out of milk is one of those apps that you can't understand how you lived without!!! It was one of the first apps that I got for my phone. Now I don't know how I could function without it! One of my favorite features is the ability to use the camera in the phone to scan bar codes on products to get them into the shopping list. So far it has pulled about 90 percent out of its database. It also has a to-do list and a pantry list, but I haven't used either of those much so I can't comment on those features. But I would strongly recommend that you check it out for yourself:-)
At $ 4.99 it's not free, but to me it has been worth every single cent!

Arnor Baldvinsson

Author Published on Leave a comment

During a skype discussion this application, PC Monitor, came up and I thought I would share this with you. Please visit http://www.mobilepcmonitor.com/ for the product website.

PC Monitor is a an application for your iPhone, Android or Windows Phone 7, that can monitor computers running Windows, Linux or Mac OS. It is free for up to 5 computers and for more than 5 computers you can buy annual subscriptions that start at US$ 49.95 for up to 10 computers and US$299 for up to 100 computers.

If you monitor or manage computers, then this is definitely an app you should take a look at. I can also see this app used as a safety device to monitor computers in an office or at home when you are not at the same location as the computers.

You can also send commands to the computers you monitor and get notifications when something happens on the computer, such as when the computer is rebooted, low on battery, when user logs in or out, etc.

Arnor Baldvinsson

Author Published on Leave a comment

Every now and then I do a "File | Save as" in C6 to clean out the gunk that Clarion collects in the apps from time to time. Been working on a fairly large app with a lot of browses and forms in it and today after adding a browse/form to it and doing some work the IDE crashed. Been working in this VM for probably 2 weeks or more without rebooting it (and Clarion 6.3 has been running that whole time) and decided it was time to do this trick again. The app file went from 7.8MB to 5.8MB! Now it loads much faster and generates faster also:) I don't know if this still applies in C7/C8 but wouldn't be surprised if it did. If you are not doing this regularly or semi-regularly to apps that you are working on a lot, your apps are collecting gunk that does nothing but slow Clarion - and you - down! It's simple:

1. Open your app

2. Use "File | Save As" to save it to a new name (I use appnameX.app)

3. CLOSE the app. This is an important step I have found.

4. Move the original app (appname.app) out of the folder for
backup IN CASE something fails (it has never failed for me, but you never know!)

5. Open the appnameX.app

6. Use "File | Save As" to save it back to the original name.

7. Keep going:)

I try to do this like once a month or so, depending on how much I work in the apps. After I posted this I received word from one guy who did this to his app and it went from 15MB to 1MB!!!)

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

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

Author Published on Leave a comment

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

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.