Once again SRP delivers features that OpenInsight developers can really use. We begin by addressing what amounts to be a branding and marketing problem for software products based upon OpenInsight. The issue occurs when Windows groups icons in the taskbar. Once this occurs, the button's title becomes "oinsight", even if the application was using the SRP Application Launcher utility. This is undesirable for commercial products since users usually have no idea what "oinsight" is. With the new SRP_Taskbar method we can alter the group button text to be anything we wish, thus preserving a software product's essential branding.

It's important to note that setting the taskbar group title only works in Windows Vista and earlier. Windows 7 uses an entirely different protocol for it's taskbar, and a solution is in the works. Look for it in the 1.3.1 release.

Also new to this version of SRP Utilities is the SRP_TcpClient method. It creates a TCP/IP connection to a running server and sends data. It's very low level and designed for those that have no other API to access a server. We have plans to augment the method with server-specific functions to simplify use. For example, SRP_TcpClient has special commands for communication with the SRP Engine Server. Likewise, we would like to add support for the OEngineServer and other TCP/IP protocols.

Lastly, we've improved both SRP_Join_Arrays and SRP_Sort_Array. SRP_Join_Array now supports two more merge options: NOT and XOR. The NOT operation keeps everything in the first list that doesn't appear in the second list. The XOR operation returns all items that appear in one list or the other, but not both. Combined with the existing operations (AND and OR), this should cover all the ways in which you might want to combine a list of keys. SRP_Sort_Array has been improved in the way it performs right-aligned sorting. Originally, it would convert the column into floating point numbers and compare, but this would not work with data that had alphabetic characters. For example, it wouldn't correctly sort "Box 1", "Box 2", ... "Box 10". SRP_Sort_Array now performs true right-aligned sorting in the event that it cannot convert the data into binary floating point numbers.

If you are currently using version 1.2.3 or earlier, we highly recommend upgrading. Both existing users and those that wish to try this free utility can download the latest version of SRP Utilities from here.