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FMS 17 Missing Admin Tool

FMS Missing Admin Tool

Claus Lavendt, of Data Manix, built – and is giving away for free – a FileMaker 17 Server admin tool.  Called, appropriately enough, the FMS 17 Missing Admin Tool.  FMS 17 sports a new admin panel similar to the FileMaker Cloud interface.  But it lacks some of the features of earlier versions:

While we are excited about some of the new great features, the FileMaker 17…

FileMaker Data Migration Tool

FileMaker Data Migration Tool

The new FileMaker Data Migration Tool (available only through a FileMaker Developer Subscription) is probably one of the most appreciated new features in the FileMaker 17 release.  By developers, for sure.  But any business using FileMaker solutions should also rejoice. Using the Data Migration Tool will significant development time moving data from one beta version…

More FileMaker 17 Information

FileMaker 17 Information

Don’t look now, but there is a lot of information coming out about FileMaker 17 new features.

Geist Interactive’s headline seems to indicate a problem with FileMaker 17 for the author…don’t be fooled.  It focuses on the fact that FileMaker 17 added major features to the FileMaker Platform, such as the Data API, the Data Migration Tool (more on that below), business logic…

FileMaker 17 is Here!

FileMaker 17

As promised – a planned release every year – FileMaker 17 is available today!  Let’s take a look at the new features.  First off, there are several new features aimed to help developers (and users, too):

Finally:  Support for multiple email attachments

That’s right, send as many attachments as your email account will allow (based on file size, of course) using the Attach Files option…

Are You An Introverted Developer?

I happened across this post this morning: Is Being Introverted Affecting Your Confidence?

We all know that the Big Five personality traits—openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism—are important personality-determinants. Their varying combination in each of us dictates why we evolve to become who we are.

And up until recently, scientists believed that…

SVG Icons for FileMaker and Other Fun Stuff

SVG’s for FileMaker

Eric Sterbenk of  The Support Group posts on a great source for SVG icons and a way to easily modify the icons to make them FileMaker compatible:

Who else but Google has created a style guide for all of their applications and shared it on the interwebs for everyone to use. Material Design is basically a design language that Google created to unify digital interfaces and…

JSON Help from Kevin Frank, Jordon Peterson

JSON Help

Kevin Frank, of FileMakerHacks.com fame, posted part 1 of a new series about JSON, Thinking About JSON. His post explains the basics of JSON from basics to pretty advanced, and includes a free FileMaker Example file, json-sandbox.fmp12, as well.

I’ve been working on a couple large JSON projects over the last few months, and with the one year anniversary of FileMaker having built-in JSON…

Needs vs Wants, James Clear on the Chosen Ones

Needs vs Wants

A problem most people routinely experience, for themselves or with dealings with others, is telling the difference between a need and a want.

Jordon Watson studied the differences as it applied to developers dealing with clients, and shared his findings at DevCon 2017. The following four points are part of his observations, and are pretty much true:

Customers don’t know what they…

FileMaker’s View Menu

FileMaker’s View Menu Someone named Alison posted a video on the Free FileMaker Example List recently, a list usually reserved for linking to, well, Free FileMaker Example Files.   I shared it, nevertheless, because I liked the content.  It seems Alison started a YouTube channel called “FileMaker For You” recently, aimed at helping FileMaker beginners. This is a good thing, and you should share…

FileMaker Cloud Delpoyment, LinkedIn Costly Mistakes

FileMaker Cloud Deployment This is a relatively short video (38 minutes) from FileMaker giving a fairly high view of the FileMaker Cloud Deployment process.  It’s not intended to be a detailed setup guide, but it good for showing all the parts of the process to an interested client.   LinkedIn Costly Mistakes I found this article…

Hourly Billing, API Integrations, REST, JSON

Hourly Billing is Nuts For FileMaker developers looking to break out of the hourly billing cycle, check out Jonathan Stark’s offerings at the link.  The price is reasonable and posts I’ve read in the past by him are worth your time. Source: Hourly Billing Is Nuts by Jonathan Stark   The State of API Integrations in 2018 If you are at all interested in the other side of API’s – how they are…

FileMaker on Appstream, Design in 2018

Filemaker on Appstream Stu Dietz posted a detailed explanation on using FileMaker in a web browser – but not using WebDirect!  How is that possible?  By using an Amazon Web Services (AWS) called Appstream.  Appstream is a feature that runs a wide variety of programs inside a web browser on a Windows Server instance.  The benefits are similar to WebDirect in that the program is running on a server…

The Results are Miraculous – An Update on My Son, Jon

This post is completely off my normal topics of FileMaker and business, but it’s time to update everyone on the progress of my son, Jon. For those who don’t know, here is a short version of the backstory: Jon has two advanced degrees, Computer Science and Industrial Engineering, and, in 2014, was living the life of his dreams in Seattle working as a software tester and developer. Jon is 32 years…

FileMaker Popover Menu I stumbled across this 17 minute video and thought it should be shared as a great example of how to build a simple, attractive, effective FileMaker popover menu.  Bobby Hritz, of Cross It Solutions and Solutions, LLC, also shows how to build submenus by adding in slider panels and some coding.  All in all, an elegant solution that works well for many situations:…

Why Use JSON with FileMaker? Using FileMaker and JSON together opens a whole new world to your users. JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is, first and foremost, a simple means of exchanging data between a browser and a server. JSON is a text only tool with some interesting characteristics: It’s a lightweight data-interchange format (data exchange between different programs) JSON is self-describing…

Using ROI to Sell, Weight Loss and Tim Cook

ROI – Return on Investment Chuck Melton of MainSpring posted an informative article on using a variation of Return on Investment (ROI) to help sell your custom application (hopefully FileMaker!). What is ROI? A standard definition for ROI is pretty straight forward: The return on investment ratio calculates the percentage return (profitability) on an investment. This is usually calculated…

FileMaker UX and UI. And What is GDPR?

FileMaker UX and UI with Semantic UI Humming Tech is pushing the boundaries of the FileMaker User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI) recently, and their latest effort is no exception.  This time it is a video tutorial (with a Free FileMaker Example File) on integrating features from the free Semantic UI development framework: Semantic is a development framework that helps create beautiful,…