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.