Unless something dramatic shows up in testing I won't be reporting further on this build. Hopefully the next release will be the one that goes out to CSP members.

It turns out there's a problem with FireFox and some printer drivers. The only workaround I know of is to print from Print Preview instead of printing directly.

Like many Clarion third party vendors located outside the United States, we price in US dollars for the convenience of both US and worldwide customers. A year ago we had to raise our rates due to a strong Canadian dollar. Now the situation has reversed. How long this situation will last is anyone's guess, although even as I write this the Canadian dollar seems to be strengthening again.

We'll try to hold these prices until the end of the year, but we can't offer any guarantees. In other words, prices are subject to change without notice.

Subscribe/renew now and stay up to date on the latest C7/Clarion# releases. And of course we'll continue to cover Clarion6.

Pricing

Renewal prices are for subscribers with a currently active subscription.

New subscription prices include all the back issues; we began publication in 1999. If your subscription lapsed more than four months ago you pay the new subscriber rate. If your subscription lapsed less than four months ago you pay a lower rate (calculated by the store).

A one year renewal is $109, new sub is $159.

A two year renewal is $199, new sub is 249.

A three year renewal is $269, new sub is $319.

Whether you're a US customer looking for a deal or an overseas customer who's been hammered by the strengthening US dollar, this is a good time to subscribe or renew.

Subscribe/renew now

To check the status of your subscription log in to the My ClarionMag page.

I'll have a more detailed look on Friday or Monday; meanwhile it looks like steady progress, and it wouldn't surprise me if the next release goes out to CSP participants.

Why hasn't AppGen gone out to all beta program participants? Releasing the AppGen to third party vendors ahead of time has two benefits. First, this testing may reveal problems that would prevent other Clarion developers who use third party products from compiling their apps; besides the possibility of bugs, the C7 compiler is stricter than the C6 compiler and some not-quite-legal-but-works-fine-in-C6 code may need to be tweaked. Second, getting the third party issues dealt with up front means less trouble later distinguishing C7 issues from third party issues. On the whole, letting the third party folks kick C7 around should shorten the overall beta period and make for a more productive beta period for C7 developers.

I should have a First Look up tomorrow (Wednesday) so I'll save most of my comments for that article. And really I haven't had a chance to do much except open a few apps and find my way around the new AppGen. I have managed to crash the IDE a few times, as have other developers, which isn't a big surprise. This is after all the first time anyone outside SV has played with this product, and we're bound to stress it in ways the SV developers never will. I do expect to see fairly quick progress on reported bugs, based on my experience with the initial IDE beta.

I've certainly been able to open an app, have it convert, use the window designer, add embed code (via embed points and the embeditor), compile and run, so I know the AppGen works, and does most (nearly all) of the things I need it to do. And it's fast. In one test I repeatedly added a new global variable to the School app, regenerated and recompiled. C6 took 17 seconds; C7 took just 10 seconds.

The AppGen overall looks familiar, if modernized. Some things have shifted place; some other things are slightly easier to get to. There's a whole lot that's new, including solutions containing multiple APPs (and PRJs), the color-coded embeditor, code folding, support for multiple versions of Clarion (which needs some work but looks promising; more on that in the First Look), a real source code editor, the file schema pad, the very cool alignment features in the window designer... well, I'll leave it at that for now. More cool stuff tomorrow.

In this installment: Massive lists of articles and news items.

The Clarion Magazine home page has some URL options you can use to list all articles (and at the same time news items) for a given year, a given year and month, and even all articles and news items ever published in Clarion Magazine.

The three parameters involved are year, month, and limit. You'll need to specify the limit parameter in all cases or the default (currently five) applies, and typically you'll specify a limit higher than any reasonable maximum. .

For instance, to see all articles for 2008 you can use this URL:

http://www.clarionmag.com/index.html?year=2008&limit=500

You'll notice that the articles are in descending order (newest articles first), which is the default. To see oldest first add &desc=false to the URL:

http://www.clarionmag.com/index.html?year=2008&limit=500&desc=false

To see just the articles published in May, add the month (and, if you like reduce the limit, though it won't matter unless you use a lower limit than the number of articles available):

http://www.clarionmag.com/index.html?year=2008&month=5&limit=50

Again, add &desc=false to the URL to see the oldest articles first:

http://www.clarionmag.com/index.html?year=2008&month=5&limit=50&desc=false

To see all articles ever published in Clarion Magazine, in descending order, try this (but be prepared to wait - it's a very big page):

http://www.clarionmag.com/index.html?limit=2000&desc=false

I tried that with a limit of 1000 but that only took me to mid 2006. A 2000 limit should work for a few more years. The URL on the site index uses a more generous value of 5000.

The same approach works on the news page. To see all news items for this year:

http://www.clarionmag.com/cmag/news.html?year=2008&limit=500

And to see all news items ever posted (another big page):

http://www.clarionmag.com/cmag/news.html?&limit=5000

Actually that isn't all news items ever posted - it's all news items since January 2001. Prior to that time I created the news pages manually (I can't believe I actually did that). And a limit of 5000 should work for another two years or so.

Now, here's a fun thing to try. If you're using Google's new Chrome browser, bring up the above news page. Press Ctrl-F and type RPM in the search field. Chrome will highlight all the instances of RPM in the document and show a colored line for each instance in the scroll bar. Click on any line to jump to that instance of the search term.

To keep up on all the latest Clarion articles and news, make sure your Clarion Mag subscription is up to date. Log in to the My ClarionMag page to check your status, and/or go to the ClarionMag store to renew/subscribe. Remember, the fall subscription sale ends Friday, Sept 26.

Store: http://www.clarionmag.com/cmag/store.html?action=shop

Site index (which also has links to the Clarion Online articles): http://www.clarionmag.com/cmag/siteindex.html

Oh, not C7 and Clarion#, per se. We all know that's coming.

I'm thinking operating systems. Specifically, Vista 64.

I know, Vista is the OS everyone loves to hate. Except, it seems, when it's 64 bit Vista. Maybe it's the 128 GB maximum addressable memory. Maybe it's better stability thanks to the 16 bit subsystem finally getting turfed (and incidentally, every time I try to type "16 bit" my fingers say "15 bit" - it just happened twice in this sentence - which I suppose means my subconscious is trying to tell me something).

Whatever the reason, I'm hearing more and more about Clarion developers going to 64 bit Vista. Why are they doing it? Because of VMWare.

As Mark Riffey explains, VMWare is a great solution to two problems. One will be with us for a long time, and that's the need (at least for some of us) to test applications against various versions of Windows. With VMWare you can install as many different Windows versions as you like. Each Windows OS runs in its own virtual machine, in its own window, making it trivial to keep as many different test beds as you need without shelling out for a whole lot of extra hardware.

The other problem, which I trust is about to go away, is that the old (the very old) Clarion IDE is a 15^H^H 16 bit app. And you can't run 16 bit apps natively on Vista 64 (that's a good thing). But you can run C6 and its predecessors on 32 bit Windows, so all you need is a virtual machine and, say, an XP install disk. As well, with the old IDE contained in its own virtual machine you no longer have to deal with focus issues when switching between apps.

Now, not everyone needs to test apps against older operating systems, and not everyone wants the (minimal) hassle of running Clarion in a virtual machine. That's still holding back some folks from making the switch. But once AppGen ships with C7 (and I think that day is getting pretty close) I believe we'll witness a sea change, with a great many Clarion developers switching to Vista 64. And some of those developers, once they get to Vista 64, will see the light and get VMWare anyway for compatibility testing.

Vista 64, gobs of memory, a fast multi-core mobo, C7/Clarion# and VMWare all make for a sweet development environment.

No doubt someone will point out the benefits of making developers use minimal hardware, thus encouraging them to optimize their code. That's how the old London Development Centre worked, and the idea has merit.

Just not a lot of merit.

There are lots of ways to design for and test against minimal hardware, memory-constrained virtual machines being one, virtual machines on crappy hardware being another. Just don't restrict your development that way.

To keep up on all the latest Clarion articles and news, make sure your Clarion Mag subscription is up to date. Log in to the My ClarionMag page to check your status, and/or go to the ClarionMag store to renew/subscribe. Remember, the fall subscription sale ends Friday, Sept 26.

Store: http://www.clarionmag.com/cmag/store.html?action=shop

In this installment: ClarionMag's most popular subscriber-only articles.

Actually there are some difficulties in evaluating which of Clarion Magazine's articles are in fact the most popular, and if I had a more sophisticated tracking system I could bore you endlessly with analysis. But I don't, so I'll just bore you a little.

I do track the number of hits each article receives, but that in itself doesn't tell the whole story. For one thing, the longer an article is up, the more times it's likely to be read, so older is better. For another, some articles are referenced a lot in subsequent articles, which improves their numbers. And of course free articles will have much wider readership and cannot be directly compared with subscriber-only articles (I'll cover the top free articles another time).

Here are the top fifty subscriber-only articles of all time, with the most popular article's rating normalized to a value of 1:

The most popular article, Jim Kane's Interfaces Everywhere, falls into the category of much-referenced articles, as it laid the groundwork for much of Jim's COM work. That, I think, accounts for its substantial lead over the #2 article, Colin Wynn's treatise on spicing up Clarion apps (and what do you know, sex really does sell). Colin's article is also a few years newer, so I'd say it's a contender for top spot.

COM and SQL dominate the top fifty, with Clarion 6, XML, the Windows API, OOP, and .NET all putting in appearances.

But of this list, only one article has a publication date after 2006. That's mostly because of the time factor - these articles have been around long enough to get more reads.

Here are the top fifty subscriber-only articles published since January 2007:

SQL is still a big factor, but unsurprisingly .NET has taken over from COM. (Which is as it should be; one of the really wonderful things about .NET coding is all the stuff you can get done without having to resort to the dog's breakfast that is COM. And when you have to use COM you can often do so indirectly, via an existing .NET wrapper.)

The embed analysis series has received a lot of attention, likewise the numerous articles on Vista and its virtualization and security "features." And of course anything on C7 is a must-read for many ClarionMag subscribers.

So what can you expect to see in the coming months? Much more on C7, no doubt. Although the templates aren't changing a whole lot from C6 to C7, the IDE is quite different, and there are a lot of nooks and crannies to explore. Once AppGen ships the number of developer hours ClarionMag readers spend in the new IDE will go up dramatically, and along with that I expect a lot of discoveries about workflow and development tools and techniques.

I also anticipate a fair bit of Clarion# coverage, although that probably won't hit the big time until there's a Clarion# AppGen and at least one template set. But we'll see - as always, it's all about what ClarionMag readers want to read and need to know.

If you're not a Clarion Magazine subscriber, you can subscribe now via the ClarionMag store. If you are a subscriber and you want to check your subscription status, log in to the My ClarionMag page. To top up your sub, again just head over to the store. But don't drag your butt. The fall subscription sale ends Friday, Sept 26.

You can secure your Gmail account by going to the Settings page and setting your browser connection to "Always use https". Thanks, Jeff.

Ah, it turns out the music was written by Terry Riley, in C, in 1964. So there's a reason it's being played.

Just not a good reason.

UPDATE: Whoops, C was just a twinkle in Dennis Ritchie's eye in 1964; the piece in question is called "In C", and my thanks to Geoff Robinson for pointing out the error of my ways. Geoff suggested that minimalism isn't my cup of tea. I've had another listen to "In C" and it's much more pleasant all by itself (though 30 seconds seems plenty to me). Unfortunately it was an overly-loud accompaniment to Bray's rapid-fire delivery; the combination would make rather a good torture device, I think.

Dude. I've seen code that was worthy of punishment.

It's just about time for the keynote addresses. Meanwhile I have a couple of tutorial reports from yesterday that need some cleaning up - hopefully I'll get a chance to post them before the day is out, but I have a pretty fully schedule alerady.

Ah, we're rolling now with a video parodying video game development.

"When you create sound effects, do they come out of your head?"

"No, they come out of my mouth."

Heh heh.