Sue and I send you all our best wishes for Merry Christmas and Happy
Holidays this season:) May we all enjoy a prosperous New Year in 2011:)

Once I have posted this I am going to be out of the office until Tuesday, December 28. I will probably check my email couple of times over the long weekend, but don't expect speedy support;)

Thank you all for your business and support in 2010:)

Arnor Baldvinsson - Susan Pichotta
Icetips Alta LLC

I use Skype quite a bit for all kinds of contact with clients and programmers and it has become part of my life. I just found out that it has been down all day, at least for me and millions of other users. Click here to read more about this problem on the Skype blog.

Here are couple of other links that have some more information:

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/12/22/skype-down-for-millions-of-users/

http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/tom-keating/skype/skype-down.asp

Hopefully they will get it back up again soon:)

Arnor Baldvinsson

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

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

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

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