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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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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Resizing Images in FileMaker Pro 12
July 11, 2013 6 Comments
Sometimes it is the little things in an upgrade that take a while to percolate through to real world applications. FileMaker Pro 12 has its share of amazing marquee features, (Insert from URL, ExecuteSQL etc), but the humble GetThumbnail function didn’t cross my radar screen until recently. I read an article by DB Services on […]
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FileMaker Navigation – Go to Layout Script
July 10, 2013 1 Comment
This is a demonstration of a simple navigation system. FileMaker has had layout tab objects for a while and they are great, but in many solutions you actually want to move between layouts to view different data tables. I show the way I like to do it and then an alternative that works in some […]
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Cluster Maps Continued: Perimeter Search in FileMaker Pro 12
June 21, 2013 7 Comments
Working on a presentation for a customer that employs the Cluster Maps concept, the request came up about doing perimeter searches—as in ‘How do I see all the related addresses around a specific location?” This ability would aid sales people in the field, cut down on travel etc. A search on Brian Dunning’s very useful […]
Continue reading MailChimp Integration with FileMaker Pro 12 – Part 4 of 4
June 20, 2013 6 Comments
Readers have reported problems running this file on Windows in FileMaker 11. The problem is that with a Web Viewer on Windows, Internet Explorer, the underlying technology behind the Web Viewer on Windows doesn’t like raw JSON files returned from MailChimp. There are some other solutions for FM 11, but it is fairly simple to […]
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