I was recently asked by a client about how to set up a record locking system. The idea of record locking is that when some event happens a record becomes no longer editable, preserving the contents from change. I have used two different strategies for record locking before and they are both useful, depending upon […]
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FileMaker Pro 13 Icon Replacement
January 3, 2014 
5 Comments
Some FileMaker developers, myself included, were disappointed that FileMaker Inc., did not alter the colour scheme of the new icon for FileMaker Pro 13. As a developer, I keep usually keep the last few versions of FileMaker Pro active on my drive. Lined up in my dock, I can’t tell which is FileMaker 12 and […]
Continue reading Talk to FileMaker Pro on a Macintosh
December 31, 2013 2 Comments
Macs have had a built-in speech recognition system since the last version of OS X, Mountain Lion. Apparently things have been improved in the new version and I have been playing around with Mac OS X Mavericks latest iteration with FileMaker Pro to enter notes into text fields and even do numeric data entry. Set […]
Continue reading 2013 in review
December 30, 2013 Comments Off on 2013 in review
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog. Here’s an excerpt: The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 100,000 times in 2013. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 4 days for that many people to see […]
Continue reading QR Codes in FileMaker 12 & 13 — No Plug-ins, No Custom Functions
December 18, 2013 7 Comments
A while back I did a blog posting on generating 2D Bar Codes, or QR Codes from Google’s Chart API. The demo was created back in the dark days of FileMaker 11, before the advent of the Insert from URL function (FM12). In the old demo I used a Custom Function and a free plugin […]
Continue reading FileMaker 13 – Use Base64Encode/Decode for Icon Storage
December 11, 2013 5 Comments
Another nice new feature in FileMaker Pro 13 is the set of Base64Encode/ Base64Decode functions. Base64 encoding is a method of representing binary data (for example a .png icon file) in an ASCII string format (suitable for pasting into scripts or calculation fields). This new set of functions have the potential to eliminate extraneous Global […]
Continue reading Bar Code Scanning in FileMaker Go
December 6, 2013 14 Comments
One of the new features of FileMaker Go 13 was the addition of the ability to scan bar codes directly into the database. It is a nice new feature but probably won’t replace a dedicated scanner in many situations — here is why. Bar Code Test database Setup is simple. Create a layout with a field […]
Continue reading FileMaker Pro 13 – First Thoughts
December 3, 2013 31 Comments
FileMaker Pro 13 is now available from FileMaker Inc. The marque features are the new WebDirect feature and a new licensing model based on concurrent connections. There are some very useful new interface and development tools which will get developers excited about using FileMaker Pro 13. When I read the system requirements, my heart sank […]
Continue reading Hiding in Plain Sight: Using Invisible Tab Panels for Pick Lists
September 30, 2013 5 Comments
Recently I attended a FileMaker UI/UX Masterclass (UI = User Interface, UX = User Experience) session put on by FileMaker Canada in Vancouver. The session’s main presenter was Yann Liqueur-Salzédo from Infografix in Nice, France. Yann’s innovative design work wowed the crowd at the 2012 FileMaker DevCon in Florida. He has recently launched a web […]
Continue reading Running FileMaker Scripts from Your Desktop with Launchy or Alfred
September 12, 2013 2 Comments
Here is a cool trick, a method of running FileMaker Pro scripts directly from the Desktop on Mac or Windows computers. My friend Joshua Paul of Neo Code Software sent me an email with the headline “Launchy/Alfred + FileMaker FMP URI = AWESOME“. Josh is often coming up with innovative approaches to technical challenges, so I […]
Continue reading Dialing Phone Numbers using SkypeOut from FileMaker Pro
September 3, 2013 11 Comments
A while back, I found a technique to launch Skype and using the SkypeOut URI scheme, dial a number in Skype. I tested the ability recently and was surprised to see that the technique seems to be broken. Back in 2006 Skype announced on their blog that a FileMaker plug-in had been created by Premium […]
Continue reading MailChimp Integration with FileMaker Pro – Part 5 of 4 – Importing Mailing Lists
August 13, 2013 2 Comments
A reader asked recently about getting a MailChimp list into FileMaker Pro. The work that I did on the MailChimp integration demo was based on a project that I did a customer who wanted to start syncing an existing FileMaker data set with MailChimp, so we were starting with the data in FileMaker. It was […]
Continue reading Cluster Maps and Instant Web Publishing
August 12, 2013 1 Comment
A reader asked how to make the Cluster Maps demo database work with Instant Web Publishing. A little bit of research in the documentation for Instant Web Publishing (IWP) suggested a possible solution. The Demo database has been updated to reflect these changes. Inside the FileMaker Pro folder is a folder called ‘Web’ Inside that […]
Continue reading Drag and Drop Images from a Web Viewer in FileMaker Pro 12 on a Macintosh
July 29, 2013 3 Comments
The Problem: FileMaker Pro 12 is turning out to be a great document and image management system with some of the new features to do with Container Fields. However there is one little annoying ‘feature’ holdover from previous versions —when using Drag and Drop of images from a Web Browser or Web Viewer (Sarari or Firefox) into container […]
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