Today I was preparing a mailing to all of my FileMaker clients. I wanted to warn them about the fact that you can't just upgrade to FileMaker 7 from previous versions without giving it a second thought. One of my customers called today and said she bought FileMaker 7 because she upgraded to OS X. I told her that she should return it because the FileMaker 6 she already had would work fine in OS X and unless she wanted to spend some money on tweeking before and after, the system I built for her was going to break in 7.
This was not the first customer doing a FileMaker 7 upgrade *on-the-fly* without consulting me first. So, to avoid further problems, I wanted to do a mailing to all my past and present FileMaker customers. Since I haven't worked with some of my customers for few years, I don't have all their email addresses. In many cases, their phone numbers had changed too so I couldn't call to get their email addresses.
Google.
This is when I thought that it would be great to have a *Google* button right in my FileMaker database that could Google anyone's full name or company name with one click. If I could do that, then the next step would be to create a script and button that could Google a set of records and return data to me on what it found. I'm guessing that I will be able to create a Google button for one person. And that's probably as far as I'll go for now, but if someone wanted to build a little plug-in or custom function that would Google a FileMaker Found Set and return records, I'm ready to plunk down the cash!
Mapquest.
Later, I was looking for a great restaurant to take my Dad to for his birthday. I got a good recommendation after trying Google and not really finding what I wanted with assurance it would be good. So I wanted a map for my sister and went to Mapquest. I had already entered the restaurant into my database for future reference and actually dragged the Mapquest map right into a Map field I had available in the database.
That worked, but why couldn't I have a Mapquest button that would go to Mapquest, get the map and put it in my database for me based on the address that was in the database already? That would be so cool. In this case, if I can do it for one contact, I can definitely run a script that would put maps into every record (thousands) in my database. Learning about web services and FileMaker is starting to seem like a great idea.
Anyone want to build something like this? It's relatively simple if Mapquest has an open API and I'm sure tons of FileMaker users would be interested.