Category: Design

Panel & Networking: How Technology Can Lead The Way For Digital Transformation

by Jay Gonzales
Posted in Beezwax News, Business, Community, Design, Events, FileMaker, Front-end Development, Integration, Organization Development, UX, Web Development

As each of our clients weathers unique challenges, “digital transformation” comes to mind as something that exists in different stages. Some organizations are long-since transformed by technology, while others shifted more recently toward work dominated by the distributed as well as the digital.

In building custom applications to automate workflows, streamline operations and leverage technical advantages through innovation, we harness the power of digital transformation. We’re helping many organizations maintain existing momentum to position themselves for positive upswings, and others to recover from economic downturns, overcome turbulence in operations, or head off uncertainty about technical resources.

Digital transformation supports organizational transformation. And it can also lead this transition.

Continue reading “Panel & Networking: How Technology Can Lead The Way For Digital Transformation” →

Design Think Your Code

by darrin.southern
Posted in Claris Development, Design, Events, FileMaker, FileMaker 19, FileMaker Go, Software Design, Techniques

Have you ever opened an existing solution, took one look at the source code – and your eyes just glazed over – as if you were attempting to decipher the Matrix?

You’ve entered the world of DX, or “Developer Experience”.

Just as User Experience (UX) refers to the experience of users, Developer Experience (DX) focuses on the experience that Developers have within the code of your system. This applies whether that’s code you inherited, code you passed on to someone, or code you originally wrote — all situations which affect a person I would call ‘Developer Next’. This could certainly be your-good-self, in six months time.

Continue reading “Design Think Your Code” →

System for Success: Atomic Design for Google Display Ads

by Jinal Shah
Posted in All, Design, Front-end Design, Marketing, Techniques, UX

Jinal Shah is a UX Designer at Beezwax. She shared the process for creating Google Display ads, using a system to optimize collaboration between Design and Marketing teams.

Our design team wanted to implement a design system that could quickly generate different variations of Google Display ads in multiple sizes. This system had to balance creative freedom and brand adherence. We wanted a user to be able to change content, colors, backgrounds, buttons and other visual elements without further involvement from a designer. However, it was important to create a controlled environment so the ads would stay on brand and follow a conceptual and visual pattern.

Continue reading “System for Success: Atomic Design for Google Display Ads” →

Dark and Light Modes: 3 Simple Paths to FileMaker UX

by Christopher Edwards
Posted in Claris Development, Design, FileMaker, FileMaker 19, Front-end Design, Front-end Development, Techniques, UX

FileMaker 19 introduced support for Dark Mode. Not only does the application’s chrome support Dark Mode (like many applications), but developers now have the ability to detect the OS Dark Mode setting.

Let’s look at three easy techniques to give FileMaker Pro users a choice between Dark Mode and Light Mode, plus an option to automatically adapt modes based on OS settings.

Continue reading “Dark and Light Modes: 3 Simple Paths to FileMaker UX” →

The Impact of Data Viz | Tableau Conference 2019 Day 1

by Long Nguyen
Posted in Data Analytics, Design, Events, Tableau

And we feel welcomed!

Greetings from the Mandalay Bay Convention Center!

It’s Day 1 of the Tableau Conference 2019, and there is so much to see and do here! Prior to tonight’s kickoff, one of the exhibits that I was keen to visit is a Viz Gallery set up on the second floor. Studying each piece, I found myself struck with inspiration with regards to how I feel about data.
Continue reading “The Impact of Data Viz | Tableau Conference 2019 Day 1” →

Lost in Layout Space: Getting to Know FileMaker 17’s Layout Mode

by Andrew Witschonke
Posted in All, Design, FileMaker, FileMaker 17, Techniques

Way back when FileMaker 14 was released, as developers we were treated to the new-and-improved script workspace, adding all kinds of features from line breaks to auto-complete/type-ahead coding. To any of us who spend most of our day working in FileMaker, the response was sheer joy.

For all of its speed, flexibility, and ease-of-use, sometimes our favorite platform is missing some of those “standard”, quality-of-life features you would expect. For a long time, Layout mode has been lacking a few key features you would normally expect to see in a modern design application. With FileMaker 17, we get much closer to bridging that gap, receiving a whole bunch of handy, time-saving features along the way. Let’s dive in and take a look.
Continue reading “Lost in Layout Space: Getting to Know FileMaker 17’s Layout Mode” →

LOgiCATOR Part 3: Ready, Set, Integrate…Into Your FileMaker Apps

by Mark Scott
Posted in All, Design, FileMaker, FileMaker 16, JSON, Techniques, Tools & Add-ons

We’re thrilled to announce the official, “integration-ready” version of LOgiCATOR. LOgiCATOR is a modular search interface for FileMaker that can be easily integrated into new or existing solutions. It’s designed to help users locate data with logical precision, via a powerful yet intuitive interface for searching across FileMaker tables. This article includes a download link for the module and demo file, describes what’s changed since the preview version (a lot), and explains how to integrate LOgiCATOR into your FileMaker solutions.

Visit the LOgiCATOR page at Beezwax. Continue reading “LOgiCATOR Part 3: Ready, Set, Integrate…Into Your FileMaker Apps” →

LOgiCATOR, Part 2: FileMaker Card Windows and Modular Design

by Mark Scott
Posted in All, Design, FileMaker, FileMaker 16, JSON, Techniques

In Part 1 of this series, Introducing LOgiCATOR, I mentioned that LOgiCATOR grew out of a search interface I developed for a project several years ago. In ways we’ll briefly consider here, it wasn’t extensible, but all that has changed. As that early search interface grew into LOgiCATOR, it made a quantum leap in context independence. The reason we were able to accomplish that can be attributed to a powerful synergy of FileMaker card windows, JSON, window improvements, new functions, and the Layout Objects window — in short, FileMaker 16!

Visit the LOgiCATOR page at Beezwax.

Continue reading “LOgiCATOR, Part 2: FileMaker Card Windows and Modular Design” →

Introducing LOgiCATOR: A Modular Search Interface for FileMaker 16

by Mark Scott
Posted in All, Design, FileMaker, FileMaker 16, Front-end Design, Techniques, Tools & Add-ons

We’re excited to announce the release of LOgiCATOR, a new modular search interface for FileMaker. It’s designed as a module you can drop into a FileMaker application and, with minimal configuration, add a rule-based search interface to any number of layouts in that solution. LOgiCATOR is also a springboard for learning about some great new design and integration features of FileMaker 16, like card-style windows and native JSON.

Visit the LOgiCATOR page at Beezwax.

Continue reading “Introducing LOgiCATOR: A Modular Search Interface for FileMaker 16” →

Why It’s Always Good to Test Things with the Current Version of Software (When Writing a Blog Post)

by Mark Scott
Posted in Design, FileMaker, Front-end Design, Software Design, Techniques

While working on the third installment of Fun with FileMaker Button Bars, I was served a reminder of why it’s good to test the stuff you write about using the latest software updates (even if they just arrived that very morning).
Continue reading “Why It’s Always Good to Test Things with the Current Version of Software (When Writing a Blog Post)” →

Fun with FileMaker Button Bars, Part 3: Tips for Designing Great Icons

by Mark Scott
Posted in All, Design, FileMaker, Front-end Development, Techniques

In Part 1 (“Check Please,”) and Part 2 (“Expert Panel,”) of this series, we had some fun doing things with button bars that showed off some of their unique usefulness within the FileMaker design-layer toolbox. Often as not, your button bars are going to include icon labels, with or without a supporting text label, and you want those icons to look great.

Continue reading “Fun with FileMaker Button Bars, Part 3: Tips for Designing Great Icons” →

Introducing ‘Publish To Apple News’ – Open Source WordPress Plugin

by Jay Gonzales
Posted in All, Beezwax News, Community, Design, Tools, Web Development, WordPress

We’re thrilled to announce the availability of the Publish To Apple News plugin for WordPress. It’s an open source plugin for the WordPress web platform that enables publishers to push their blog and website content to News, Apple’s all-new app available with iOS 9.
Continue reading “Introducing ‘Publish To Apple News’ – Open Source WordPress Plugin” →

InspectorPro 5.5 Feature List!

by Vincenzo Menanno
Posted in All, Data Analytics, Design, FileMaker, FileMaker 14, InspectorPro, News

InspectorPro 5.5 is here! With it come some great enhancements and complete support for FileMaker 14:

• Now supports new features, themes, and styles found in FileMaker 14
• New visualization gives you a quick view of referenced and unreferenced items and problems
• New streamlined database view to help you get a bird’s-eye view of your database
• Automatic detection of malformed XML or invalid characters

jQuerySF 2015 – Much more than jQuery…

by Steve Senft-Herrera
Posted in All, Design, Front-end Development, JavaScript, Web Development

Attending jQuerySF 2015:

This week I had the pleasure of attending jQuerySF 2015, held in San Francisco, CA.

Despite the name of the conference, the range of web-technology topics included far more than just jQuery.

Continue reading “jQuerySF 2015 – Much more than jQuery…” →

FileMaker 14: Field Placeholder Text

by Perren Smith
Posted in All, Design, FileMaker, FileMaker 14, News, Techniques

FileMaker Pro 14 includes a new feature to add placeholder text to fields on a layout. What is placeholder text? Simply put, it is a way to put text inside a field when it is empty. This feature is useful for mobile, web and desktop users alike.

Continue reading “FileMaker 14: Field Placeholder Text” →

FileMaker 14 – Button Bars

by Will M. Baker
Posted in All, Design, FileMaker, FileMaker 14, Techniques

The new Button Bar layout object provides developers with an improved method to manage a cluster of buttons that have functional and/or cosmetic similarities.

Continue reading “FileMaker 14 – Button Bars” →

FileMaker 14: Audio/Video Control Script Steps and Functions

by Darren Burgess
Posted in All, Design, FileMaker, FileMaker 14, News, Techniques

FileMaker 14 introduces new controls available in the mobile FileMaker Go app that help to bring the media player experience in FM Go more in alignment with iOS. These changes, compatible only with FileMaker Go 14, include 3 new script steps, 3 new script triggers and 1 new calculation function. In addition, the script step Insert Quicktime has been removed (developers should use the Insert Audio/Video script step, which we have had since FileMaker 12).

Continue reading “FileMaker 14: Audio/Video Control Script Steps and Functions” →

Button Image Masks

by Vincenzo Menanno
Posted in All, Design, FileMaker, Techniques

Introduction

When you’ve been using FileMaker as long as I have, you know we’ve done all kinds of crazy things to get image masks to work on our buttons. For example, we would use a set of grouped native FileMaker line objects to cover an image just to get an ugly looking mask. I hope that not many developers suffered for too long using that technique.

Download Using Icons

Continue reading “Button Image Masks” →

hello San Antonio. hello FileMaker DevCon.

by Jay Gonzales
Posted in All, bBox, Beezwax News, Data Analytics, Design, FileMaker, InspectorPro, JavaScript, News, Tools & Add-ons

It’s FileMaker Developer Conference time, with 8 Beez in San Antonio for DevCon. We’re studying new development techniques from FileMaker Inc. and our industry peers, sharing a few methods of our own and even riding a few mechanical bulls at a real live cattle ranch!

Continue reading “hello San Antonio. hello FileMaker DevCon.” →

Our d3.js Saturday – Beezwax at d3.unconf

by Beezwax Team
Posted in All, Beezwax News, Data Analytics, Design, FileMaker, Front-end Development, JavaScript, Tools & Add-ons

Beezwax was a proud sponsor and participant in the first ever d3.unconf in San Francisco this weekend. This event was created as a one-day gathering of data visualization practitioners, centered on d3.js, a powerful and flexible JavaScript data visualization library.

As a participant-driven “Unconference”, d3.unconf allowed us to interact with other d3 devotees in sessions that ranged from “New to d3” through “Multivariate Data” and “Visualizing Neural Networks”.

Continue reading “Our d3.js Saturday – Beezwax at d3.unconf” →

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