FileMaker Fever

FileMaker Kernels

I've written a few brief blurbs in my twitter stream of late that I thought you should know about. I've provided a bit more detail here since I've got plenty of room. The 140 character limit on twitter forces brevity.

Feel free to follow me on twitter. I'm tokerud. My posts tend heavily towards personal technology. If you use an iPhone or iPod touch, you gotta use Tweetie. At $2.99, it is a great little app.

Here you go:

Download Twitter Data to FileMaker. At tweetake.com, It is a snap to download all your followers, people you follow and all the tweets in your twitter stream plus the last 1000 of your own tweets. Select *Everything* and then click the *Get 'em!* button.

FileMaker Developer Cards. Color laminated 8.5x11. Color highlights for which version of FM. $14.95. Available at cardsfm.comYou get two, two-sided cards. Way cool. Really well done!

FileMaker Developer's Conference in San Francisco. August 13-16. I'm local - a ferry ride away in Tiburon so will be commuting. Hope to see you there.

Please, No More Fake tabs. I used native tabs in my FileMaker product 2 yrs ago because they look cool and are simple to use and change. With FM10 script triggers attached to tab controls, tabs can fulfill their rightful destiny.

Cramped Screens? Most definitely. The user interface of FileMaker 10 is now more friendly and flexible with a customizable status toolbar on top. But, entry screens built in previous versions of FileMaker, will seem cramped on the left without a status area there. Make your screens shorter and wider to compensate. FileMaker 10 is well worth the effort!

FileMaker 10 Subsummaries in Table View, Part 2

I've now added table view layouts to 5 tables in a development version of Studio Manager. The results are even better than expected. Using tables with multiple subsummaries with sort and find buttons delivers an incredible browsing experience.

 

In the example of my Contacts Table View, I have  subsummaries for industry and company. Sorting by Industry, Company with the button provided at the bottom of the screen yields this readable and still editable view of contacts.

Clicking the Industry column heading yields a subhead for each industry, but does not put in company headings. Clicking the Company column head shows Company headings with the employees in that company listed beneath it. The user chooses the sort and view that helps with the work at hand.

Excel vs. FileMaker 10 Table View. Move over Excel, Table View goes you one better in many situations. Excel's strength is ad hoc analysis with calculations involved. We know that lots of people use Excel as a list manager. It will even ask you if you want to make a list and switch into a lightweight database.

FileMaker is the king of the hill in the end-user database game. Excel database and standard Excel is no competition for the masters. The ease of putting buttons on the screen and making them do simple finds and sorts is unmatched. You get column resizing and reordering. You get adding columns from data in your database without going into Layout mode.

I've never experienced data browsing like this in my 25 years of building databases. One of my practices in building FileMaker systems is to have a list screen for every table in the database. I've used the List View for these so that I could label my columns the way I wanted. However, I may be replacing the list screens with my new Table Views because they are so much more dynamic and useful for quick analysis and reporting. [Part 1]

VTC's Video FileMaker Tutorials Are Great and whole bunch are Free

I heard about this but never got around to checking it out till today. Somehow or other I landed on John Mark Osborne's FileMaker Pro Beginner Tutorials page today. It lists about 40 free training segments of about 5 minutes each. Some of these are featured at the FileMaker.com site.

No matter. The point is John Mark Osborne does a great job and a lot of this beginner tutorial applies whether you are a beginner or not. It features a top FileMaker  guru and master teacher talking about the new Features in FileMaker Pro 10.

That's not all. There are other topics like FileMaker Pro 10 Intermediate and another for Advanced. Again there are large numbers of free segments. The Intermediate and Advanced trainings are also taught by John Mark.

This is a try it and we think you will like it way of selling the VTC training. It's a gift. I don't know about you, but I'm watching these videos - the free ones at least. And, I'm telling my customers about them.

 John Mark starts teaching FileMaker Pro 10 certification this Spring, so he knows the latest in a very thorough way. Even advanced developers will benefit from listening and watching John Mark teach the beginner, intermediate and advanced tutorial. He talks about a lot of fundamentals and expresses his opinions on best practices such as field naming.

Subhead and Subtotal Bliss in Table View with FileMaker Pro 10

This feature is a great one to implement the minute you purchase FileMaker Pro 10. You can drastically beef up the value of table views by adding sub-summary parts - lots of them. This feature is so good that I plan to add about 20 table view layouts to my own Studio Manager product.

Here's what you usually get in Table view:

In this example, the table is sorted by Filename which doesn't have a sub-summary on the layout. I tried adding a sub-summary above for the Drive field, so when I sort by Drive by clicking the Drive column heading, I get this:

I then added a sub-summary above for File Type and then a sub-summary below to allow me to show a record count. When I click the File Type column heading which causes a sort by File Type, I get this:

The layout I created looks like this in Layout mode:

I like this a lot because all I had to do was create this layout which takes about 5 minutes max. And I have multiple views based on the column my user clicks. This is browsing your data! This empowers the user. If your data is such that you really need multiple sorts to occur, you  may need to add buttons for your sorts in the footer area.

Finally, the thing I like most is that I can do this with a single layout that is not complicated or hard to figure out. No tricks to remember or stacked fields or anything like that.

One more thing: the Modify Button. The user gets to add or remove fields to his or her view when he wants without going into Layout mode. Removing fields is especially great. You don't want a field? Just uncheck the checkbox:

Notice that you can add fields from here as well by clicking the plus button. If you do, you get this new Add Fields dialog:

This is ease of use folks! [Continue to: Part 2]

FMTouch: FileMaker in your Pocket on your iPhone

Update Aug 8: FMWebschool has just lowered the price of FMTouch to $69.99 from $99.99. They are offering $50 FMWebschool store credits to buyers who paid the full $99.99 amount.

I didn't see this one coming. FMWebschool is rocking hard. Their new FMTouch iPhone app shows true promise.

FMTouch provides a way to migrate a relational FileMaker database to reside locally on your iPhone or iPod touch. You can enter and edit data from your phone.

Even better, you can wirelessly sync your changes both ways back to a local or hosted FileMaker database. Realistically, you have to expect all sorts of constraints in these early days. But, watching the video, this mobile FileMaker app is already pretty darned amazing.

Today's press release provides you some of the details, but there's also a quick Intro Video and a detailed nuts and bolts tutorial video for your viewing pleasure. There is a downloadable list of features.

You get native performance, syncing and you are untethered. You don't have to have wi-fi while you are out away from your computer the way you would with a web app. This is truly fascinating.

FMWebschool uses a current DDR of your database to create a native iPhone version of the database. That's a pretty good trick in itself. Keep an eye on FMTouch. It is worth seeing how things go.

Hardcore FileMaker iPhone enthusiasts (especially those with bucks up clients who want to be first on their block with a FileMaker database running on their iPhones) should dive in now. It will cost you $100.

FMtouch was released on the Apple App store on August 5. You can buy FMTouch on the App store. A newer version (1.6) has already been submitted and is awaiting Apple approval.

FMTouch Youtube Video

FMCode: new FileMaker resources site

Hey FileMaker developers and advanced users. Someone in the FileMaker community is helping us out. Next time you say to yourself, "someone else must have figured out this FileMaker need before", head over to FMCode and have a look see. I'm grateful for the efforts. I could not find an About screen and it looks like the site is just now coming online. Bookmark it and keep an eye on this timely resource.

How to Do Finds Inside your Big Scripts

This is a quick one. When you have a 4 page script like the one I'm working on right now, you need a way to quickly see if you've referenced a variable or not.

The reason I needed this is that I discovered I was using $_JobID and $_Job_ID in different places in my large script. I went around and standardized on $_Job_ID and wanted to delete my set variable for $_JobID. That's when I needed the find in script feature to make sure I had eliminated all references to $_JobID first.

Here's how:

Print your script except don't print just save it as a PDF. Now search inside your PDF to your heart's content!

Getting Your Mac Disk Catalog into a FileMaker Database

I don't know about you, but as a FileMaker developer, I have about 12 usable hard drives in my house. I don't seem to ever get around to reconciling them so that I can stop buying hard drives for a while.

I was getting into the project last night because I have a misbehaving 1 terabyte drive I need to exchange. That means I need to move a terabyte somewhere else temporarily. To do this, I need to eliminate 1 terabyte worth of redundancy in a hurry.

So, I figured, I'll create a FileMaker database: a table called hard drives and a table called folders. I looked in Automator to see if it would take a folder and give me a list of its contents as text. Let me know if I missed this. I can't imagine someone hasn't added this to an automator script but I couldn't find one on short notice. That lead to me typing in about 50 folders and a couple drives. NOT!

Today is a new day, and I wanted a utility to give me the contents of a drive as a text file. Voilà, I found one called DiskCatalogMaker and it works great. Prints catalogs. It's fast too.

You get 60 days to try this out with full functionality so that's where I am with it for now. MacDiskCatalog is a nice little Cocoa app. VERY straightforward. You select Scan and it gives you an open dialog. You select a hard drive and it scans that sucker into its own catalog in 3 minutes or so for maybe 300 gigs of files.

Then you have a nice and handy export to text button. It creates a tab-delimited (I think) file with 5 fields: Name, Size, Type, Creator, Date Modified. I just dragged and dropped the exported text file onto FileMaker Pro 9 Advanced and it gave me the option to use the first row as field names - choose yes.

I wound up with a 179 mb file after I had done some Finds and Replace commands on it. Name is the full file path with the file name at the right of that path. I got rid of the hard drive as part of the path for my current purposes and put that name into its own hard drive field. I can always create a calculation to get that drive name back into the path if I need it.

From here, I'll do a bit more cleaning and perhaps export summary data cause I don't really want to know all the files on here or at least want to work with less than about 500,000 files for most purposes. If you want to be able to use filemaker to see how many copies of things you have, give DiskCatalogMaker a try!

For me this is fun and is a great relief. I might learn something about FileMaker 9's capabilities when handling a 1/2 million records at a time along the way. Remember, I got a lot more hard drives left to do but it is going to be very fast to get them in here.

Now that I have my hard drive files and directories safely in FileMaker, I'm still playing around with DiskCatalogMaker to see what all it can do. If it was smart enough to tell me what to delete without my searching on big folders, I'd be totally sold. As it is though, I've got a terabyte I need getting rid of and I think I can use it to guide me to some quick scores.

Make Sure You Know About AdminAnywhere

Wow! I was browsing 3rd party apps over at the FileMaker site and they are featuring AdminAnywhere from 360Works. Looks like a great little helper app for anyone who needs to administer a FileMaker Server and can carry an iPhone or Treo.

See my more detailed write-up over on Studio Manager Bulletin. I want my customers to take advantage of this awesome tool. I can especially imagine all my IT guys and gals using this. They like to do IT things by mobile. Click to see the photo full-size.

I know for a fact that no card-carrying iPhone or Treo owner is going to pass this opportunity up. Did I mention that it's only $49? Have fun!

FileMaker Development Tip: Going Mobile

Yesterday when I was away from my Mac(s), I had an idea for something I wanted to do in FileMaker. All I had was my iPhone. I wished for a Back-to-My-Mac for iPhone so I could run FileMaker, but that's not here yet. Will it be announced tomorrow?

Meanwhile, I decided to print my field definitions and key scripts to PDFs and make them available to me for reference from my iPhone and iPod touch via Evernote. I did say Evernote rocks as I recall.

It is working like a charm. Here I am the next day solving probems at my local coffee (with free wi-fi) hang out (Caffe Acri). I'm able to look at a script as a PDF on my iPod touch. I can see exactly what to do to offer a new Studio Manager feature.

My apologies for this photo. I tried grabbing a screenshot using Capture on my iPod touch. Had trouble syncing that screenshot to my Mac. So we have here a photo of my iPhone. Take my word for it, the screen is pristine, extremely bright and absolutely crystal clear.

The biggest win I'm going to get is probably when doing email and phone tech support. I can just look at scripts and field definitions as PDFs and a few entry screen screenshots for reference.

I already have Evernote notebooks for Studio Manager and FileMaker. You can find inside your notes in a single notebook or all notebooks. Tagging helps too.

Even when Back-to-My-Mac becomes available, it will often be much faster to refer to PDFs in Evernote. By the way, it is quite possible Evernote is working on a native iPhone version of Evernote. It might even be announced tomorrow! Dare we hope?