Category: Books

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For the past 2 weeks I have been working on getting out new releases that are compatible with Clarion 9.

There are currently three new builds available, Icetips Utilities, Icetips Previewer and Icetips PowerToolbar. There are minimal updates to those products and as far as I have tested they seem to work fine with Clarion 9.The only major change in PowerToolbar is that the install now includes the required files from XPTheme to support additional themes in PowerToolbar.

For the past week I have been working on Outlookbar. I had started work on it in January before the car accident so I decided to finish it. The main new features are a wizard to create the Outlookbar side window and a global class that controls the height. Another feature is the ability to set font information for both headers and tasks. that includes font, font size, font color and font style.

In addition to this I'm also working on technology to use external theme files for Outlookbar, Taskpanel and PowerToolbar. This will make it possible to create and distribute themes with programs and full control over the visual presentation. The idea is to create a theme designer where you (or your users) can create their own themes or modify existing themes.

I had originally planned to have all my installs done today, but that is not going to happen because of the extra work on Outlookbar. Right now I'm aiming for next Friday, the 31st.

Finally I want to mention our Icetips support portal where you can post support requests and check our Tips and Tricks forum, which has some interesting articles about our products, Windows and SQL.

Arnor Baldvinsson

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I was in Barnes and Noble today and bought two books that looked interesting.

The first one is Seth Godin's book "Purple Cow" It is about the importance of making your company or product stand out in the marketplace, just like a purple cow would do in a field of green grass and a flock of brown cows. No matter what line of work you are in, some form of marketing is something that we all do. There are people who are natuarlly good at it and then there is the rest of us who have to work at it! This book has 218 reviews at Amazon.com and get's mixed reviews. Some readers feel it doesn't really deliver much substance and is more a book written to show how smart the author is rather than to show us how to learn from his smartness, which I guess kind of makes him a smartass;) The edition that I have was published in 2009, but I'm not sure when this book was first published. The oldest reviews on Amazon.com are all from May 8, 2003.

The second book is called "Your Virtual Success: Finding Profitability in an Online World" by Alan Blume. This book is about virtual businesses and how to make them work. It is also a lot about marketing. Published on June 20, 2010, this book gets solid 5 stars at Amazon, but only 4 people have reviewed it so far.

I have only just started looking at them and will write about what I thought of them once I'm done reading them:)

My bedside reading these days are some of Patricia Cornwell's Scarpetta books.

Arnor Baldvinsson