FileMaker Fever

FileMaker Help Trick + Cool New Mac Evernote

I pasted a page from FileMaker 9's online help into a TextEdit document because I wanted to have it handy for a project I'm working on. I had not tried clicking on the links in TextEdit but was pleasantly surprised today when I did. The link worked.

When you click on a link from a TextEdit document that contains an excerpt from FileMaker help in it, it links you to and brings up an html document on your computer in TextEdit for that particular topic you linked to. Very cool. At that point, you seem to be able to cruise around without using the Macintosh Help application.

By the way, I then tried copying and pasting some of the help into my FileMaker Notes Evernote notebook (Evernote is now available for Mac as a Beta). Unfortunately, the html links to my local machine were lost in the paste. Hopefully that will be fixed.

Because I think Evernote is a cool note-taking tool for FileMaker developers, I'll mention a few more things. You can see a bunch of instructional videos about Evernote. One reason Evernote is so cool is that you can access your data from any of your machines or from the web or from your iPhone or other mobile phone. The iPhone version of Evernote came out today! One of the things you can do is photograph things like your handwritten notes and diagrams in notebooks or on cocktail napkins. Your iSight camera will work too. Evernote does handwriting recognition on the photos automatically.

FileMaker Addict website is really good

After blogging about the new Ray Cologon FileMaker book a few minutes ago, I realized that I didn't have FileMaker Addict on my list of blogs. A big mistake.

Very sorry I did not give Tim Dietrich his due. And worse, that I failed to let my FileMaker-interested readers know about the site.

One of the main features of Tim's site is that he writes up online interviews with FileMaker developers. Recently he interviewed Susan Prosser and Cris Ippolite. He goes into a lot of depth. This is a great community building contribution.

Tim has also posted about Ray's new book in more depth than covered here and he has written a couple times about the SmartPill PHP Edition that sounds really cool. I gotta read his site more myself. Its grown into an important site for the FileMaker community.

Thanks Tim. And sorry it took me so long to put you in my FileMaker blogroll!

FileMaker Pro 9 Bible Likely to Be Awesome

I've heard author Ray Cologon talk on podcasts and think he is very cool. I am sure this book will be amazing. I will write about it in more detail soon. It is on order from Amazon and will be here in a couple days.

I'm on Twitter now looking for some FileMaker developers to join me

I am very enthused and interested in the recent developments on the social web. Recently I blogged here suggesting FileMaker developers start contributing links they run across to share with other developers on Ma.gnolia.com.

Twitter is a way of posting short text messages to the web and subscribing to people's posts of their text messages. If you join Twitter (at Twitter.com), you can get your own *page* and account for free. All you need to provide is an email address. Don't quibble, you can always get a new free email account from gmail, yahoo or whatever if you want to keep your privacy.

My Twitter *name* is tokerud. No surprise there. My domain on the web is tokerud.com, so I thought I would stick with my last name. Come-on FileMaker friends out there, get an account and follow me or not or somehow let me know your Twitter name so I can follow you.

The idea with Twitter is that you permit people to see what you have to say -- I mostly talk about my ideas and discoveries when they are short snippets. I think of it as microblogging. But the norm on Twitter is simply to say what you are doing right now. Since I have a web presence and a business, I want to provide a little value to people in most of my Twitter posts so I would not post 10 times a day when I do some routine thing. Instead, I would post something major like I'm flying to the FileMaker Developer's conference right now. Something more than what I ate for breakfast.

There is such a thing as the FileMaker community all around us and extended out over the globe but much of it is latent. There are many more FileMaker users at all levels than you know. There are answers to questions, interesting ideas and knowledge, FileMaker tricks and friends out there that you don't know yet. In Here Comes Everybody, a good new book about the social web, Clay Shirky talks about latent groups. Groups and communities waiting to happen.

Because the cost of communication is dramatically reduced by web tools of various kinds, latent groups start emerging. We have a FileMaker community, but I suggest it is a lot more latent than it needs to be. I want a vibrant and visible and available FileMaker community around me. All sorts of free sharing is possible. I'm not saying professional filemaker developers will take lots of time to give away their knowledge, but if each gives away a small bit and receives even more in return we all benefit.

FileMaker VOIP Phone - Make and Receive Calls

Geist Interactive is pushing the envelope once again. Todd Geist has a video up on Blip.tv demonstrating a product he is working on called FMRibbit. He's developed the demo with Ribbit's developer tools.

The video shows Todd receiving a call right on his computer into his Filemaker database and then making a call to an iPhone from the Filemaker database.

If you are a developer and think using a FileMaker database as a phone, you'll want to keep FMRibbit on your radar. Looks like a nearterm thing. Ribbit is still in beta. You can sign up now to be notified when Ribbit is available. Geist is on the case! You can subscribe to Geist Interactive's fmtv in iTunes.

Ma.gnolia bookmarks group for FileMaker

Hi folks. Ma.gnolia is a lot like del.icio.us. It is a bookmarking sharing site. But it's a little newer and nicer than del.icio.us. Three distinguishing features are that it looks better and it has powerful support for groups and has an easier to comprehend UI.

The advantage of these kinds of sites at minimum is that you get humans (your peers) helping you find cool stuff on the web rather than relying solely on your own efforts to find cool stuff that matches your interests and priorities. If you find some people who share some of your interests, sharing bookmarks saves time and increases the value of your internet time.

When you join Ma.gnolia, you can join any of the existing groups or create your own. There's a FileMaker group already that hasn't gotten a lot of attention thus far but I thought I would tell you about it and encourage people to start sharing FileMaker-related bookmarks in Ma.gnolia's FileMaker group.

By the way, you don't have to join Ma.gnolia. The FileMaker group is open to the public. If you do register, it consists of selecting a username and password and giving them an email address of some sort. Easy.

I like playing with new social software like this and hopefully sharing with fellow FileMaker developers to our mutual benefit. Places like this keep things interesting and afterall we are software developers and like to play with new software don't we?

Update March 23, 2008. Since telling you about the Ma.gnolia FileMaker group, I've discovered Diigo which seems to be a more full-featured, firefox-supported bookmarking site. Anyone like that? Let me know if you have a preference or even prefer del.icio.us. One major advantage of del.icio.us is that it is most widely adopted. There are also rumors of a new version of del.icio.us and more social bookmarking features in Google Reader. No matter. But I would love us to collaborate around sharing links pertaining to filemaker. Let me know your thoughts here or via email.

Using BaseElements for FileMaker Pro 9 to get PrivilegeSet data

I purchased BaseElements from Goya in mid December and it is a must have tool from my perspective as a FileMaker developer. I need all the help I can get to document my solutions, check them for errors and find my way around my solution when I'm building new features or debugging something that's not working the way I want.

BaseElements takes the XML in the DDR and puts it into nice little FileMaker records where we can see exactly what is going on and get to the heart of the matter in a hurry.

I'm enjoying having this tool very much but I found it even more valuable after making a discovery. The solution is pretty open but where it is really wide-open is when you create new layouts. I was trying to get all the table and field access details of the 16 privilegesets in Studio Manager into records so I could print them out as documentation and use them as a reference without having to go into Manage Accounts & Privileges.

It wasn't obvious how to do this because all I could see was a privilegeset record with some tabs, one of which showed each table in a portal with things like whether you could create, edit or delete records in that table given the current privilegeset. I wanted all the custom field access. What fields could they not see? That seemed to require getting down to a lower level of granularity but there was no tab for that.

I happened to try creating a new layout and voilá all the related tables within the PrivilegeSets table were there for my choosing. End of problem. You can export data too. I don't really need to export, but creating a simple custom report layout will give me what I need.

My next experiment will be to try out the compare file capability introduced in version 1.6 that lets you compare one version of a solution with another. I already purchased and wrote about FMdiff and recommend it to the skies for those who need a near instantaneous way of comparing two filemaker files.

Bought BaseElements 1.6.5 Today

I was able to purchase BaseElements for $399 because I am an fmpug member ($100 off. I already have Inspector but like the traditional and intuitive relational design of Base Elements much better.

If not for the cost, I would have bought the 1.0 version. I'm finishing up a new version of Studio Manager (v 9) and need the error checking and references and dependencies. Great program. Highly recommended!

Check it out at www.goya.com.au.

FileMaker Pro 6 Worked Once in Leopard

No guarantees, but I did have success working in FileMaker Pro 6 with a copy of a client's data in Leopard. I would not try this with live data at all. But, it's nice that I did have no problems working in FileMaker 6 for 30 minutes doing several different operations.

FileMaker Inc. will not go back and test FileMaker Pro 6 to assure that it is fully compatible with Leopard. They don't have the resources to go back that far. That means, use at your own risk. This is a tough situation for FileMaker consultants because most of us want to run the latest version of OS X. I have enough computers (3) that I can keep one on Tiger, if need be, but many of us will need to choose to stay compatible or move on.

FileMaker Pro 9 Roadtested

It's been over four months since FileMaker Pro 9 was released in July. The first 30 days or so, I used FileMaker Pro 9 with some hesitancy to be sure no serious bugs would be found. I am happy to say that FileMaker Pro 9 and 9 Advanced have held up like champs. They just work. I highly recommend FileMaker Pro 9.

To be clear, there will always be bugs and issues with any large, complex piece of software. You never squash all bugs because changes have unintended consequences that may only show up in extremely rare situations. So, don't stop backing up. If you have a complex installation, you know it and know to (1) have an impeccably thorough and frequent backup system that matches that complexity and (2) do a lot of testing when you upgrade to new software to make sure everything works. I will say, though, that in these hectic times, corners are cut in the testing department more often than I would like. So, this is the disclaimer/reminder.

That said, I would not hesitate to recommend FileMaker Pro 9 as the basis for the work of all of my customers who have upgraded beyond FileMaker Pro 6. Maybe you still haven't crossed that hurdle. Even though FileMaker keeps getting better and better at conversion of FileMaker 6 with each new release, you still need to test and prep the files before you convert. The minimum you want to do is use the File/Save a Copy as... command on each file you have before you convert. That goes for anyone upgrading to FileMaker Pro 9, whether from FileMaker 5 or FileMaker 8.5!

So, you've fluffed up your files with Save a Copy as and done some testing commensurate with the complexity of your database, system configuration and deployment (how many users do you have?). Then you are ready to experience a great, great piece of software.

You can sleep easier at night with FileMaker Pro 9. Remember how I was saying that a surprising number of people don't test and backup as much as they should? Well, FileMaker Inc. hates it when a database is damaged or lost because a hard drive goes bad or something else goes wrong and there's no good, current backup. They don't like tearful phone calls anymore than the rest of us do. Besides spending a lot of time making sure the FileMaker community knows about backup best practices, they've put a special new feature into FileMaker Pro. FileMaker Pro 9 spot checks the quality of your files for you. When you open up a file in FileMaker Pro 9, a quick check is done to see if the file is OK. This is not a foolproof test, but I like the due diligence.

You can sleep even easier at night with FileMaker 9 Server. Geared to larger installations where more is at stake, FileMaker 9 Server takes this data checking and notification way further. You have the option to receive automated emails when the Server's automated backups occur. You have the option to be notified when and whether verification is successful. This isn't sexy but it is new and really helpful. If you are using a mission critical FileMaker database, you want this stuff!

Most of us FileMaker users are like other software users, we don't scratch the surface of what the software is capable of. We don't take the time and effort to learn what the software can do. It's often just that we can't find the spare time. If there's anything you should do to improve your database after you upgrade, it is to use the new Conditional Formatting command to make your database more expressive. In a couple of minutes, you can make your overdue invoice numbers automatically turn bold red when they need attention. conditional formatting will make your users aware of important discrepancies and missed deadlines.

But, I'm a FileMaker Professional and I'm enamored of all the little things FileMaker did to make FileMaker Pro sing. The little touches that make all the difference. All the heavy FileMaker users who get under the hood on a regular basis are thrilled that now they can have script windows open while they test those scripts or add or modify calculated fields. You can keep the ScriptMaker window open and do other things and come back and it's still right where you left it. You don't know the time that saves!

I took a 1/2 day course on PHP and FileMaker and took many additional hours of sessions on PHP and FileMaker at the FileMaker Developer's Conference this year. There was huge excitement about FileMaker making it easy to use PHP when you want to deploy a database on the web. I have to admit that I have not yet ventured to the web with PHP with my Studio Manager product. But, give it a little more time - I hate being an early adopter when mission critical systems are at stake. We should see some amazing stuff in the next year or two.

In my memory, I can't remember a release of FileMaker that inspires such devotion in the FileMaker developer community. It seems that a lot of these developers refuse to work on systems that are based on anything but FileMaker 9. FileMaker 8.5 just won't do!

FileMaker Pro is a seriously mature database development environment these days. It's still easy to use at the entry level for quickie database needs, but it has graduated to the big leagues. And, of course, there will be more where that came from. I am so impressed with the commitment of FileMaker, Inc. They're like Apple (big surprise, they are a subsidiary of Apple)! They do great things for a living.

The magic is still there and growing with my use of FileMaker Pro Advanced. I recommend everyone who gets FileMaker Pro 9 makes sure they have a copy of the Advanced version. I see FileMaker Inc. has caught on and now include a copy of Advanced with their multi-user bundles these days. Debugging, copying script steps, copy and pasting tables and lots of other things make the Advanced version a must have.

Before I end this little rave, I just want to mention FileMaker Inc's new product, Bento. From what I hear it is sexy and it is meant for personal applications, not the bigger, more elaborate stuff that FileMaker is often pointed at. I'm so busy at the moment, I haven't taken much of a look, but I'll be back with my take on it soon.