Look and Feel

One of the most important aspect of software development is how the resulting software looks and feels by your users. This aspect is often ignored or overlooked by software developers who spend most of their time writing the software and may not be the right people to judge how it should look. We provide several solutions to improve the look and feel of your Clarion applications and make them more appealing to your customers.

Icetips Magic Entries
The Icetips Magic products, the Magic Buttons and the Magic Entries allow you to customize the way buttons and entries look in your application. In data entry software users look at entry forms all day and it makes a lot of difference to the user if the forms look pleasant. You can set the entry color, optionally specifying different colors for required fields and disabled fields as well as the border color. You can also set the corners to be round or sharp. The Magic Entries give your forms a flatter look that is more pleasant to the eye.

Icetips Magic Buttons
The Magic Buttons do to your buttons, what the Magic Entries do to your entry fields. With the Magic Buttons you can add a background image to the buttons, which makes them look any way you want them to! With the Magic Buttons you get a collection of about 60 button images that you can use in your application. The documentation even comes with a tutorial on how to create buttons for your application in PaintShop Pro.

Icetips Previewer
Reports are one of the most important part of most software. It must be possible to get the information, that is put into the database, out in a format that is easy to use and understand by your users. One of the frustrating part is previewing the reports in report previewers that don't look anything like the rest of your application. Here we can help with our excellent Report Previewer that, unlike any other Clarion report previwer, is completely customizable. You, the developer, can create a previwer in your application by using a simple wizard that creates a procedure in your application. This procedure has all the code and controls ready for you to modify if you want to. This allows you to change icons on buttons, change colors, remove buttons or add buttons and do whatever you want. Out of the box it comes loaded with features and you can always add to it. You can even have multiple previewers with different options in the same application! This gives you full control to allow access to certain functions based on who is using the software and also to use full runtime or compile time translations.

Icetips Wizards
When creating a new application or a new procedure, it saves a lot of time to have the application or procedures look as close to what you want them to from the start. In the Clarion wizards there are very few options to do that but Clarion 6 makes it a little bit easier. We provide wizards in three different flavors, Icetips Reporter, Icetips Standard Wizards and Icetips Professional Wizards. We discuss each of these more on the Productivity page, but we want to mention them here because they provide you with tools to design applications that look and feel the same throughout the entire application. You can do this because these tools allow you to set design standards before you start to do anything. This drastically reduces the time that you need to spend on setting properties for controls after you create the application or procedures. With the Professional Wizards you can even register your third party templates, and your own templates, and add the extension templates you want to the application, browses, forms and reports before you create a single procedure!

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