[Icc-announce] Year End Thanks and 2008 Plans

[Richard]

Thank you for your support in the last year. In fact, a number of you 
have been our loyal customers for a number of years. For all of you, 
please accept our sincere thanks.

The embedded tools market is becoming more challenging. We still 
believe we have the right model of "easy to use professional tools at 
an affordable price." Nevertheless, some tweaks are needed:

- Minor pricing increase. The base prices of the tools will be:
== STD - $249
== ADV - $369
== PRO - $549
Upgrade pricing etc. will be on the website as of Jan 1st, 2008.

- More target support
== Parallax Propeller C
== Atmel AVR32
== > 64K support for MSP430X
== S12X for CPU12
== ARM Thumb2
Of course we will continue to support and enhance our existing products.

- More technological improvements
== Tuned MIO
== new Coloring Register allocator
Our goal is to keep pushing the envelope re: price / performance, 
even on the high end of the market. We continue to invest in deep 
engineering projects in pursuing this goal.
== Eclipse based IDE
We will not forgo our simple to use IDE. However, as customers demand 
increase, we will release new IDEs based on Eclipse as alternatives.

- More Product Integrations and Leveraging
To further leverage our compiler expertise, we are planning to add:
== A preemptive RTOS with optional TCP/IP, USB, file system, etc. The 
RTOS will be scalable from small 8K devices to ARM7/AVR32s.
== More hardware development packages. We understand it is important 
to have a package options with easy to follow examples and complete 
tool integrations.

If you have any software or hardware products that you think may be a 
fit for our company, please feel free to discuss it with me.

Lastly, the office will be closed for a few days until the weekend, 
may your Heart and Hearth be warm, may the Light of your Spirit be 
Bright, and may the coming year bring you much joy!


// richard <http://www.imagecraft.com> 
<http://www.dragonsgate.net/mailman/listinfo>