I have been looking at the feasibility of submitting an app to the Mac App Store using FileMaker. When the Mac Store was first announced, it sounded like the apps had to be created in Xcode/Cocoa and nothing else would do. Since that time, I have seen discussion of using Adobe Flash and RunRev’s LiveCode […]
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URLs in PDFs – Yet another reason to shorten URLs in FileMaker
January 25, 2011 
9 Comments
Long URLs in FileMaker If you have a long URL in FileMaker, it is no problem. You could just have a button to open the URL from a text field. However, if you export the same URL to a PDF to circulate the information to others who don’t use FileMaker, you can hit problems. The […]
Continue reading That Syncing Feeling – the Dangers of MobileMe.
January 4, 2011 4 Comments
Attempting to solve one problem, many new problems are created. For the TL;DR crowd – bought MacBook Air (MBA) on sale, setup MobileMe syncing between MBA and MacBook Pro, decided MBA too limited. Decided to return and in preparing to return to store deleted all of my contacts, calendars and bookmarks, Time Machine saves the […]
Continue reading 2010 in review
January 2, 2011 2 Comments
The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health: The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow. Crunchy numbers A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 9,700 times in 2010. That’s about 23 full 747s. In […]
Continue reading FileMaker Progress Indicators using a Web Viewer and Animated GIFs
November 9, 2010 13 Comments
With the advent of the Web Viewer technology being added to FileMaker, developers started to employ these useful containers for all sorts of things. One of the obvious things is to add an animated GIF to a layout to give users an indication that something is happening when a long script is running. There is […]
Continue reading Paradise by the Dashboard Light – Bouncing around in FileMaker, building Charts
October 21, 2010 9 Comments
FileMaker Pro 11’s new Charting ability, is a great addition to its feature set. It can however, be a little confusing how best to grab the numbers to use in the label and data (X and Y axis) series of a graph. I set out to build a ‘management dashboard’ layout for one of my […]
Continue reading Creating and Storing 2D Bar Codes in FileMaker
October 7, 2010 8 Comments
2D Bar Codes are all the rage these days. These new style bar codes can store considerably more data than a standard bar code. Combined with the wide spread availability of iPhones and other smart phones with a built-in camera, capable of scanning these codes, there is an opportunity to employ these codes for a […]
Continue reading FileMaker MailChimp Integration – Part 3 of 4
September 15, 2010 22 Comments
UPDATE: 2013-06-20 FileMaker 12 version of the demo is available that should work with Windows. UPDATE: 2012-08-07 Windows users with FileMaker 12 have an option to solve the JSON error message issue by swapping out the Web Viewer steps and instead employ the new Insert from URL script step. This will save a few lines of code […]
Continue reading Shortening URLs using FileMaker
September 6, 2010 5 Comments
Update: 2012-11-27 At the request for reader Robin, I had a closer look at this and it seems that both Google and Bit.ly have gone to POST method (rather than the simpler GET method) and are more locked down. They both now require an API key. You could build a method for this approach, but […]
Continue reading “FileMaker Go” demonstrates Apple’s double standard on Flash
August 31, 2010 18 Comments
UPDATE Sept. 9th, 2010. Apple: We have listened to our developers and taken much of their feedback to heart. Based on their input, today we are making some important changes to our iOS Developer Program license in sections 3.3.1, 3.3.2 and 3.3.9 to relax some restrictions we put in place earlier this year. In particular, […]
Continue reading How to Clear a Saved Password in FileMaker
August 23, 2010 Comments Off on How to Clear a Saved Password in FileMaker
Saved your password and can’t get to it? Here is how to get it ‘unsaved’ “Remember this password in my keychain” clicked accidentally? Sometimes, whether accidentally or intentionally, users will click the ‘Remember this password in my keychain. I usually recommend, especially for laptop users, that they not check this option, because then password control […]
Continue reading Drag and Drop List or Portal Sorting
August 17, 2010 6 Comments
2014-06-16 Update: After spending a fair bit of time on getting this technique to work, I have come to the conclusion that it is too slow to use on a network and can’t recommend it to others. If you plan to use this on stand alone or runtime solutions, it could still be an interesting approach. […]
Continue reading Growl Integration with FileMaker
August 12, 2010 4 Comments
FileMaker dialog boxes can be informative, but sometimes they are just annoying. You have to click them to get them to go away. Lots of times, you just want to give a little bit of feedback to the user, so they they get a clue as to what your scripts are doing, without requiring them […]
Continue reading Creating an Action Items Menu Button on a Layout
August 5, 2010 3 Comments
FileMaker 10 and 11 Script triggers allow you to clean up your interface by condensing a number of script buttons into a single popup. Here is how to get rid of unsightly buttons on your main layout by condensing a bunch of scripts into a single Action button. Source: FileMaker Advisor: http://my.advisor.com/doc/19582 1) Create a […]
Continue reading ‘Type Ahead’ Style Searching through Portals in FileMaker Pro
July 29, 2010 5 Comments
FileMaker’s new Script Triggers allow you to achieve a Google-like type ahead search in FileMaker, searching through a Portal. Here is how to set something like this up based on a person’s first and last name. The more letters you type… The more the portal gets filtered… Define a Search Field Later we will tie […]
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