dotfmp: Python + Claris® FileMaker® | Historical Data & AWS Athena/SQS/S3 | UX & DX for Great Solutions

Christos Savva, Fabio Bosisio and Vince Menanno from Beezwax present at dotfmp Berlin, 2023.

This week we’re in Berlin… one of the stops on the Road to Claris Engage 2024 …gathering with the developer community, and highlighting innovation for the Claris FileMaker platform development. As conference speakers at dotfmp Berlin (June 1-3), Christos Savva, Fabio Bosisio and Vince Menanno from Beezwax present three sessions:

  • Enhancing FileMaker with Python
  • What do you do with all this historical data in your app? [AWS Athena Interactive SQL / Serverless / S3 with FileMaker]
  • Elements for Building Great Solutions [FileMaker UX & DX]
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Modern Full-Stack Web Frameworks: When to use What and Why

When it comes to choosing web development technologies, we now have more options than ever. And while that’s a good thing, it also poses a problem. Answering the question, “What is the ideal technology for this new project?” is not as easy as it used to be. In this post, I briefly highlight the most popular full-stack web frameworks, and why you might want to choose each of them.

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

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.

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Unite Hacks 2022 Hackathon

Who doesn’t love a good hackathon?! Unite Hacks, a 12-hour, student-led, in-person hackathon is happening this weekend in Oakland, CA. We can’t wait to see what these talented developers can build.

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System for Success: Atomic Design for Google Display Ads

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.

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Math in a FileMaker field, for Inputter’s sake

Editor’s Note: An often-ignored reality of data management is that entering data, correctly and cleanly, into all of these database apps we build can be a royal pain in the…
Assumptions can be dangerous, like assuming that your office manager-doubling-as-bookkeeper wants to manually calculate tax on every Invoice row. Or even has the time to.

Not many job titles (anymore) are simply “Data Entry Manager,” and yet entering data is a task that continually must be managed, by one or by many, in the role of “Inputter”. Just entering data can be tedious enough — so, let’s not make it harder. In fact, let’s strive to make it easier. With that in mind, Beezwax Senior Developer Christos Savva provides an example of performing math in a FileMaker field, using a custom function. This is designed to improve data entry user experience, for the sake of Inputters everywhere.

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Dark and Light Modes: 3 Simple Paths to FileMaker 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.

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Modularizing The JavaScript You Already Have

Over time, without structure, things fall apart. So give them structure, a few conventions, and start to make them more maintainable. Let me say more, at least in the context of JavaScript in your applications (or did you think I was talking about gardens or buildings or such? lol.)
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Mark Scott presenting at DIGFM: Modular FileMaker Design

We have better tools than ever in FileMaker to create reusable modules. In this video of Mark Scott’s presentation at a Bay Area FileMaker developer meetup, he explores why the combination of card windows and JSON reigns supreme for modular FileMaker architecture. Included is an in-depth look at how modules can open, close, and communicate.

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Large d3.js Application Development

“Code that belongs”. This is the mantra, the quest, of Beezwax Senior Developer Ryan Simms; which he discusses in this ten-part article on building a large-scale web application using d3.js. How to write code that fits the context intrinsically. The article focuses on specific techniques with the data visualization library, d3.js. But the lessons are broad. How do you make something fit — in ways that make it feel like it belongs?

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Introducing LOgiCATOR: A Modular Search Interface for FileMaker 16

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.

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

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

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.

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Fun with FileMaker Button Bars, Part 2: Expert Panel

Fun with Button Bars, Part 2: Expert Panel

Have you ever had a FileMaker design conundrum for which you wished you could convene an Expert Panel to help guide you? If you’re thinking “panel of experts,” I can’t help you, but if you’re looking for a more flexible and visually engaging alternative to FileMaker Tab Panels, this combination of a slide-panel control and a button bar just might be your “Expert Panel.”

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What is Dependency Injection

If you are a developer, chances are very good that you know what Object-Oriented (OO) code is. You might have also heard about OO Design Patterns, things like single responsibilities, decoupled code, and my subject here: Dependency Injection (DI).

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jQuerySF 2015 – Much more than jQuery…


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.

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Our d3.js Saturday – Beezwax at d3.unconf

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”.

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