Pushing FileMaker Alerts to the iPhone
by Michael Gaslowitz
If you use FileMaker to send Growl notifications, you may really benefit from Todd Geist’s post on Teaching FileMaker to Send Alerts to an iPhone.
Combining Prowl, the Growl iPhone client, and the 360Works ScriptMaster Plugin, Todd wrote a ScriptMaster Module to push any text you like to an iPhone.
February 7, 2010 • FileMaker, Plugin • Leave a Comment
FileMaker DevCon Recap 2009: Thoughts for 2010
by Michael Gaslowitz
First and foremost, if you attended the 2009 FileMaker Developer Conference and want FileMaker to know what you thought, liked, or hated about it, make sure you submit your speaker and overall conference reviews. Nothing will change if they do not know about it.
As for me, I only have two suggestions to those planning the 2010 FileMaker Developer Conference:
- Have the exhibit/dining hall at the center of conference, and
- Record the conference sessions and sell them through iTunes
Layout Mode
This year, the conference was not well laid out physically, with the exhibitor/dining hall placed at the far end of the hotel, away from where any of the sessions were held. I do not know if rooms could have been rearranged differently, or if that was the best the hotel had to offer. I do know the conference felt separated from itself, and that attendance in the exhibitor hall was way down from previous years.
If FileMaker wants to provide a better conference experience next year, they will pick a conference center that can accommodate a large exhibitor/dining hall surrounded by conference rooms. This would give attendees a central place at the conference to regroup between sessions, network with other developers, and talk to exhibitors about their products.
The Conference on iTunes
But the number one thing that FileMaker can do next year, that would be beneficial to everyone on so many levels, is record the conference sessions and sell them on iTunes. Apple already does it for WWDC, so the business model should transfer nicely:
- Sell E-tickets to the conference alongside full conference passes. Offer a pre-conference price for them, and an option to buy individual development tracks, or the conference as a whole.
- After the conference, give each paid conference attendee, session presenter, and E-ticket holder an iTunes code for free downloads of all of the sessions.
- Continue to sell downloads of the conference until next year’s conference.
- Profit!
Some would argue that offering paid downloads of the sessions would lower conference attendance. While this may be true, lowering the cost of entry to the conference will allow more people to “attend” than ever before. I imagine the number of people buying E-tickets will more than make up for any decrease in attendance revenue. I also believe that a good percentage of those buying E-tickets would begin buying full conference passes in the years to come.
Conference attendees will benefit because they will be able to see any sessions they missed, or their favorite session again and again. To bolster attendance, FileMaker could keep the Keynote under NDA, and not offer it for download at all. Most conference attendees will agree that the real value of the FileMaker Developer Conference is interacting with other FileMaker developers between sessions and in the exhibit hall. However, there is something to be said for getting your money’s worth.
September 26, 2009 • DevCon, FileMaker • Comments Off
FREE Lasso Webinar – Lasso Arrays
by Michael Gaslowitz
Before I forget, I want to let you all know about a free webinar that Tami Williams is giving next week on Lasso Arrays. For those who do not know, Lasso is one of the many ways to get FileMaker data onto the web.
Date: Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Location: Your desk! Online training via WebEx
Time: 2:00 PM – 2:45 PM EST
Cost: FREE
Register now!
September 25, 2009 • News • Comments Off
FileMaker DevCon 2009 Recap: The Sessions
by Michael Gaslowitz
I want to use this post to share with you a few of the sessions I attended at the 2009 FileMaker Developer Conference in San Francisco, CA. The theme this year was developing with FileMaker 10
Thursday, August 13, 2009
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Jonathan Stark, jonathanstark.com, presented a pre-conference session called Intro to PHP. Seeing as how he wrote the book Web Publishing with PHP and FileMaker 9, he was more than qualified to explain constants and arrays to an intro class.
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The Keynote Session was held under a very threatening NDA. It was awesome. You should have totally been there.
Friday, August 14, 2009
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Matt Navarre, msnmedia.com, presented Extend and Optimize FileMaker Search, because he is Mr. FileMaker Search. Have you seen fmSearchResults? It uses one field and one layout to show the search results of multiple tables. It knows the data type (text, number, date, etc.) you are searching for, offers suggestions, and has an algorithm for ranking results. It is very, very fast.
fmSearch results also uses the development technique I mentioned earlier, Virtual Lists. Basically, FileMaker data (from multiple tables) is stored in a global variable, and the global variable can then be parsed and referenced from an unstored calculation field or web viewer. Add some conditional and text formatting to make it really shine. Todd Geist has a more thorough explanation in his recap.
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Bill Heizer, Senior Consulting Engineer at FileMaker, presented Advanced Script Triggers. Need help remembering the difference between pre and post event script triggers? If the action that caused the trigger was Open, Enter, Modify or Load, OpEnLoMo, then you have yourself a post-event script trigger. Commits, Keystrokes, Reverts, Close, Saves, and Exists, CoKeRCSEx are pre-event script triggers.
Saturday, August 15, 2009
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Albert Harum-Alvarez, lead designer at SmallCo, presented The Idiom of FileMaker: What’s New, What’s Old, What’s New Again!. FileMaker has really matured over the years with the advance of portals, tabs, script parameters and variables, and Albert cautions developers against their overuse. He recommends against using table occurrences for search queries, creating gratuitous variables, and hard-coding business data and field names in scripts.
But the biggest and simplest piece of advice I took from his session was, “Code as if the next developer on the project has an anger management problem and knows your home address. More advice can be downloaded from Albert’s website here.
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Geoff Coffey, co owner of Six Fried Rice, presented DRY FileMaker: Techniques to Keep Scripts Error-Free and Manageable. Follow this advice and you will stay ahead of the game:
- Do not build things that work, build things that do not fail. Planning for what can go wrong is more important than testing to see if something works.
- If you must fail, fail early. You do not want unpredictable code in the hands of a client that thinks it works.
- DRY, or Don’t Repeat Yourself. We create databases so users only need to enter a name once. We should apply that principle to how we create the database itself. Learning how to modularize scripts and code is the key.
- “We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.” – Donald Knuth, 1974. Stop doing it.
Sunday, August 16, 2009
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The best advice to come out of the Under the Hood session this year is as follows: When FileMaker loads a record, it loads all data from every field of that record (except container fields), even if a field is not on the layout. If you are storing large chunks of text in your database, but hardly ever using that field on a layout, your database may be running slower than it has to. Just move that field to its own table with a one-to-one relationship, and your database will run faster for layouts that do not use that field.
A big thanks to all who presented this year!
September 19, 2009 • DevCon, FileMaker • Comments Off
FileMaker DevCon 2009 Recap: What Was Different?
by Michael Gaslowitz
Another year, another FileMaker Developer conference. For this year’s recap I decided to add a little more analysis on the conference itself, so these next three posts about the 2009 FileMaker Developer Conference will ask the following three questions:
- How was this year’s conference different from previous conferences?
- What did I get out of the sessions?
- How can next year’s conference be better?
As the title of this post may suggest, this post is about the major differences I saw at this year’s conference, and what effect, if any, they had on the overall experience.
Location, definitely not Kansas
This year the FileMaker Developer Conference was held in downtown San Francisco, a city with amazing food, culture, and public transportation. Usually the conference is held at a vacation-style resort, with 90+ temperatures and a lazy river, so the concrete jungle and temperatures that required layers was definitely different.
Weather and hotel amenities aside, some would argue that the urban setting enticed people to go off campus, and spend less time socializing with other attendees. That might be true for some, but I liked having the option of soaking up a little culture with my FileMaker, and I do not think I talked about FileMaker any more or less because of it.
Some would argue that San Francisco was an expensive place to hold a conference in this economic climate, but I did not feel like I spent any more or less than I did last year. In fact, as explained below, if you consider when the conference took place, it had the potential to be even more affordable than previous years.
Timeframe
The conference ran from Thursday, with pre-conference sessions in the morning and an early evening Keynote, through the closing sessions on Sunday afternoon.
I personally think this is much better than starting the pre-conference sessions on Sunday, holding the Keynote Monday morning, and ending the conference Wednesday afternoon. If we ignore the pre-conference sessions, which will always require you to get to the conference a day earlier, this year’s conference could have been attended in only two business days at the end of the week, compared to three business days at the beginning.
In a profession that could easily argue time is money, how can you argue with this schedule? I hope FileMaker has a Thursday through Sunday conference again next year.
FileMaker ran the show
And finally, for the first time I am aware of, FileMaker, not Advisor, ran the conference. From registration to the closing sessions it was FileMaker running the show. Why did FileMaker choose to do it themselves instead of outsourcing some of it Advisor? No idea, and I am not really concerned, because at the end of the day FileMaker did a good job. And from FileMaker’s perspective, who could argue with 1,100+ attendees?
September 7, 2009 • DevCon, FileMaker • Comments Off
Video: Conditional Borders
by Michael Gaslowitz
This post demonstrates a conditional formatting trick to change the border color of a FileMaker object. Spoiler alert: there is no border.
iPod Download (1.2 MB)
Download ConditionalBorders.zip
May 30, 2009 • Conditional Formatting, FileMaker, Podcast • 1 Comment
More script-triggering plugins
by Michael Gaslowitz
Are you bummed the zippScript plugin is no longer available, and that the script-triggering functionality in FileMaker 10, while awesome, does not work on all layout objects? Try using these plugins instead:
- ScriptMaster from 360Works
- DoScript from myFMbutler
- EventScript from Software for Humans
All of these plugins are free, and compatible with FileMaker 10.
March 22, 2009 • Plugin • 1 Comment
To all current and future subscribers…
by Michael Gaslowitz
If you currently subscribe to A FileMaker Blog, and are reading this post in a feed reader, I successfully configured Feedburner to generate the feed- without breaking anything.
If you have no idea what any of this is about, take a minute to learn about feed readers, and subscribe today.
March 14, 2009 • News, RSS • Comments Off
AFB Wordle
by Michael Gaslowitz
Image courtesy of Wordle.
February 6, 2009 • FileMaker • Comments Off
AppleScript your FileMaker Pro Advanced Menus
by Michael Gaslowitz
The Data Viewer and the Script Debugger are staples in every FileMaker developer’s toolkit, yet there is no built-in keyboard shortcut or script step for either one of them. With four lines of AppleScript, these menus are now within reach:
tell application "FileMaker Pro Advanced" activate do menu menu item "Data Viewer" of menu "Tools" end tell
tell application "FileMaker Pro Advanced" activate do menu menu item "Script Debugger" of menu "Tools" end tell
To install, we could copy/paste these scripts into a Custom Menu that uses the Perform AppleScript script step (and of course a keyboard shortcut), but that would require us to do that for every database file we create. A better option would be to use a system-wide keyboard shortcut application like Quicksilver, FastScripts, or the built-in Keyboard System Preference.
If you run into problems, make sure your computer is configured properly.
January 31, 2009 • AppleScript, FileMaker, Toolkit • 2 Comments
