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”
A well-designed Domain Specific Language (DSL) can help you be more productive as a developer, thus making you, your team and your clients happier. In this post, I’ll guide you through the design and creation of a simple DSL to create EPUB files. We’ll start with a regular API and refactoring until we get to a DSL solution.
Continue reading “Writing DSLs: The joy of human consumable APIs”
Since FileMaker Server version 13, FMS has used its own Apache configuration files on macOS instead of just adding includes to the OS configuration files. Because of this, the technique I mentioned here no longer works for newer systems. This new arrangement has reduced issues for FileMaker Server’s web connectivity.
Wow! InspectorPro 6 is finally here. Can’t even believe it. It was such a massive undertaking. Lots of great new things and many improvements. Really proud of this release. In the immortal words of the late Steve Jobs… “This is our best version ever”.
One of the first lessons I learned with FileMaker is that of context! Layouts, reports, calculations, scripts, and so on all act from the perspective of a single Table Occurrence (TO) — the “context” — pulling in data from related tables as needed.
Generally, the record set being acted on is the set of records in that context table occurrence or a found subset thereof. There are a few exceptions to this, however, and today we’re going to explore one of those.
A few years ago, I worked on a FileMaker project where the client told us that every week they need to import about 7,000 rows of data that represent some information that this company uses. And every week there might be some modified records, some records that don’t show up any longer, and some new records that hadn’t already existed. For this example, let’s just call it this data “Products”.
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.”
Continue reading “Fun with FileMaker Button Bars, Part 2: Expert Panel”
If you purchased your FileMaker Cloud server with user connection licenses, you may well wonder “Where do I get the client software to connect to my server?”.
A fair chance you’ll initially land on the screen below. This seems relevant, but there’s still no indication here how you can download the FileMaker Pro clients you have licenses for.
Continue reading “FileMaker Client installers with FileMaker Cloud”
Here we’ll list the steps you’ll need to enable authentication using Amazon accounts with FileMaker Cloud.
If you’ll be having more than a few different people logging in to the Admin Console of your FileMaker Cloud server, it’s generally good practive to avoid having everyone use the same credentials. By enablling an additional authentication mechanism, you can easily add or remove administrative access to a server, and user’s get to use their own own credentials.
Continue reading “Use Amazon OpenID authentication with FileMaker Cloud”
If you’ve installed the FileMaker Pro client using a “For Teams” license, or as part of your FileMaker Cloud server usage, you may see a new dialog in FileMaker Pro.
In version 15, FileMaker has introduced a a new user-based licensing model. With FileMaker for Teams and FileMaker Cloud, a license allows use of Server and Client software based on the number of subscribed users.
Continue reading “What’s this "Sign in to FileMaker Server" dialog?”
We’ll discuss how you can use a one or three year reserved instance for your FileMaker Cloud instance. This can shave 30% or more off your AWS instance charges.
Determine Usage
When you spin up any new AWS based VM you will by default be using an hourly instance. This can be perfect for short-term usage or where your usage may fluctuate frequently.
Continue reading “Using an AWS Reserved Instance with FileMaker Cloud”
If you had started a FileMaker Cloud deployment, but lost access, accidentally closed the page, or had some other issue that caused the process to stop, you may be able to restart your deployment easily by going to the AWS Marketplace and checking your history.
Continue reading “Restart interrupted FileMaker Cloud deployment”
Although setting up your AWS account and creating a new FileMaker Cloud instance is a fairly easy process, it does have dozens of steps, and a few places where you could easily take a wrong turn. On this post we’ll go through each step in the configuration of your Amazon AWS account and requesting your first server.
Continue reading “Step-by-step for FileMaker Cloud”
…for a live, hands-on presentation of FileMaker Cloud. You’ll walk through the setup of a free trial with our guidance. Free credits for AWS will be provided, courtesy of FileMaker, Inc. Presented by Beezwax, hosted at 42 USA’s facility in Fremont.
If you follow tech industry news I am sure you’ve read and heard about the need for greater diversity in the industry. While the discussion began with a focus on women and people of color, diversity in hiring also includes people with disabilities, parents in need of flexible scheduling, gender diversity and people from diverse socio-economic backgrounds.
Continue reading “Maximizing Diversity to Bridge The Tech Gap”
Beezwax’s Vincenzo Menanno is hitting the road this week to visit our FileMaker colleagues across the West Coast, talking about “FileMaker Collaboration, Performance and Insight with InspectorPro”. Vince will be presenting our latest research, development and product offerings to FileMaker Developer Meetups in Seattle, Portland, Santa Clara and Los Angeles.
Continue reading “FileMaker Collaboration, Performance & Insight with InspectorPro”
This is Julian’s Out of Office email reply. We thought it would be fun to share it, along with the work mentioned herein. Enjoy!
From: Julian Nadel
Subject: Out of Office; @ Burning Man
Hello. I am off-line, returning to email on September 7th.
We are pleased to release another update to bBox, v0.84 of our free utility plug-in to extend FileMaker solutions to other programs, code libraries, and OS X functions including Python, Ruby, AppleScript, Perl, Bash/sh, XPath, and SQLite.
Continue reading “Version 0.84 of bBox for FileMaker Now Available”
Ever wonder how you might be able to create a mobile app with data you already have in your FileMaker solution? I have, too! As it turns out, it’s not too outlandish of an idea thanks to the FileMaker Custom Web Publishing with XML API.
Continue reading “Building Native Mobile Apps with FileMaker Data”
FileMaker 15 introduces a major enhancement for the Script Workspace that is a real boon for developers: editing Undo and Redo. This functionality continues the efforts at making the Script Workspace more like a “text editor”. It’s a stress-reducing development enhancement that I think will improve our ability as FileMaker Developers to write scripts.
Continue reading “Freedom to Experiment – FileMaker 15’s Script Undo/Redo”
