Icetips Blog

I apologize for the very long time without blog posts and a very quiet first quarter of 2012 from Icetips! No, it hasn't exactly been quiet time for us

After CIDC 2011 I spent quite a bit of time working on product updates that were subsequently sent out to beta testers. My goal was to start releasing new updates and couple of new products in mid to late January and was trying to get as much done as I could before I started pushing things out.

Well, that didn't quite work out as planned. Around the middle of January my main development computer started flaking out. At first it looked like the main drive was going bad, so I got a new drive. That looked like working until the day after I got it done, I could no longer boot the computer. At that point I couldn't get into the BIOS setup so I suspected the motherboard was dead. Decided to get a new motherboard and CPU for it. Got that set up and got Windows 7 installed on the new drive. Everything looked good. Installed the NVIDIA graphic card that I bought last summer and everything seemed to work fine, until about 10 minutes after Windows 7 booted, the monitors went blank and the computer turned off couple of minutes later. I replaced the video card and I finally had a working machine again – with everything replaced except the power-supply, which I had replaced last summer along with the video card to try to eliminate the flicker in Clarion 8, as well as the DVD drive.

On the plus side I have basically a brand new machine with an ASUS P8 P67-M Pro motherboard and Intel i5-2500K quad core CPU and stuffed with 16GB of ram. It runs very, very nicely On the negative side, all this messing about had taken almost 3 weeks!

Oh, and in the meantime the power-supply in my server was flaking out so I had to replace that as well. A bit later my old development computer starting having issues, but that was fixed by doing some cleanup on the drives and in the registry. And in the meantime I had to go on antibiotics for a stomach infection – always fun!!!

When I had finally got my main machine back up and running I got a call from a long time client who needed some data conversion done ASAP as well as some programming - urgently - is it ever any other way? Well, it started out as a one week project that ended ended up taking just over three weeks. At that point all my schedule for the first quarter of 2012 was completely shot!

For the past month I have been playing catchup with the various projects I have been working on and had to leave when things went haywire in January. I also decided to re-organize the office and that took about a week but it came out really nice and works much better for us

Sue has been very busy as well. Last year she took on a conference manager job for the Association of Software Professionals - ASP. The conference, ISVCon will be in Reno Nevada, July 13-15, 2012. For more information please look at http://www.isvcon.org. The ISVCon is for ISVs (Independent Software Vendors) who market their products on the internet. The goal is helping ISVs learn about marketing and sales. Sue also went back to school last week and is now studying at the Peninsula College in Port Angeles and she is going for a 4 year bachelor degree in business management.

Right now I am working on getting a new product out the door. It will be released to beta testers this week and since it's fairly simple I expect it to be released very soon after that. There is a new build of the Utilities coming out later this month, mostly added documentation.

Releases of Magic Locks, Outlookbar, Powertoolbar, Xplore and Taskpanel will follow in late April and May. Build Automator 2.0 will be released in the second quarter (Q2) as well, probably towards the end of it.

I will blog in more detail about the schedule once I have the new product out to testers and I've had a chance to inhale and figure out what's next.

Make sure that you follow us on Twitter and Facebook as well as I often post short comments there about what is going on.

I have just uploaded a demo program for Icetips Outlookbar.

The install is about 1.7MB in size and contains a local compiled version of the Outlookbar Demo app as well as the help file (Outlookbar.chm) and the Outlookbar manual (Outlookbar.pdf)

Outlookbar is easy to use with a single global extension template and a control template you add to your window. It is compatible with Clarion 5.5 to 8.0 in both ABC and Legacy. It comes with a 56 page PDF manual and also includes help files in .hlp and .chm formats for easy look up.

Outlookbar is all Clarion code, no external dll or Active-x controls involved, just pure old Clarion code It is included in our Gold Subscription and now you can also buy it separately using the Solo subscription. For more information please check out out the Outlookbar product page and the Solo Subscription page.

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