Steve Jobs 1955-2011

by Michael Gaslowitz

I would not be where I am today if it were not for this man.

October 6, 2011 • News • Comments Off

FileMaker Feud is coming to DevCon

by Michael Gaslowitz

Attention FileMaker friends and DevCon attendees: MightyData, a filemaker consultant, trainer, and certified developer, will host a contest at this year’s conference called FileMaker Feud.

Two teams, each consisting of one FileMaker coach from MightyData and four DevCon attendees, will test their FileMaker knowledge at 2 p.m., August 3.

The team that picks the most popular answer to questions on common FileMaker topics including layouts, calculations, and scripts will earn the title of FileMaker Feud Champion as well as have the opportunity to win cool prizes, such as coaching from MightyData, an iPad 2, an iPod touch, and iTunes gift cards.

This is the chance to have some fun with the MightyData team. To register, visit the MightyData site and fill out the audition form.

Since The Feud is all about surveying the audience, MightyData also needs your help in coming up with the most popular answers to 25 FileMaker development questions. Simply visit http://www.mightydata.com/fmfeud/survey.php, fill out the form, and answer the questions. Once completed, you’ll be entered to win a free admission to MightySummit, a three-day full filemaker immersion experience in Las Vegas taking place March 21-23, 2012.

June 16, 2011 • DevCon, FileMaker, News • Comments Off

DocuBin 1.0 is here!

by Michael Gaslowitz

After 2.5 years of hard work I am proud to say that DocuBin shipped today! If you have been looking for a document or digital asset management system, I have your database right here.

April 21, 2011 • DocuBin, FileMaker, News • Comments Off

DocuBin

by Michael Gaslowitz

If you are looking for a quick and elegant way to store documents and images of all types and sizes, then I have the database for you. We are calling it DocuBin, and I am very proud and excited to be sharing it with you.

Check out the sneak peek video, or better yet, come visit the 360Works booth at the FileMaker Developer Conference and I will give you a demo!

If you want to join our list of early testers send an email to DocuBin@360works.com.

August 14, 2010 • DocuBin, FileMaker • Comments Off

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 • Comments Off

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, with an unofficial focus on script triggers and a development technique called Virtual Lists, which the folks in the Great Northwest developed.

Thursday, August 13, 2009

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.
The Keynote Session was held under a very threatening NDA. It was awesome. You should have totally been there.

Friday, August 14, 2009

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.
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

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.
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:
1. 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.
2. If you must fail, fail early. You do not want unpredictable code in the hands of a client that thinks it works.
3. 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.
4. “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

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