ISO FileMaker Magazine

More and more these days, we find ourselves jumping back and forth between desktop computers and using our increasingly convenient mobile devices. At least, that’s how it’s been with many of my personal FileMaker projects./Users/matt/Desktop/filemaker-desktop-mobile-design.png

While designing for each target device, in an ideal world, is a luxury we’d like to afford, there just isn’t an unlimited supply of time and money.

The solution is to create a hybrid design which will work as well on mobile as it does on desktop. In order to accomplish this, you have to leave some of your “desktop ways” behind and adopt some of the minimalism you find within mobile design.

While FileMaker is adding more and more for the mobile platform, we still have a somewhat limited set of field widgets for interacting with data. At least as it relates to portals and related data. On mobile, a portal typically needs to be scrollable via a finger or thumb flick, yet on desktop we tend to want to enter/edit data quickly because of the tab key and physical keyboard access.

Striking a balance is the goal, and it can certainly be accomplished with the tools we have today. This video is about a common pattern for input of data. It covers a number of tips and tricks about keeping data presentation minimal yet exposing the necessary functionality.

FileMaker 12 introduced a totally new landscape for layout design. Along with the new way in which objects are represented, was the new way in which a layout was defined.

We now have this offscreen area of a layout. It's a convenient "storage area" of sorts. Where you can store "in progress" layout elements and documentation.

It doesn't stop there, however. You can include a lot of things which contribute to the actual logic of how your FileMaker solution functions. Take layout script triggers for example, or even portals themselves. When you leave a given layout, your portals reset and triggers may fire, which you may not want. So the best solution to this problem is to simply keep some things offscreen that would otherwise be onscreen.

This video shows you a variety of useful tips which take full advantage of the offscreen area of layouts. Looking to learn more about killer FileMaker development? This video won't disappoint!

When first starting to use FileMaker, the templates you’re exposed to may impose certain conceptual limits on how you use the various areas of FileMaker Pro.

Take layouts for example, you use a form view to enter data and list view to view a list of options you can choose from.

There are, however, aspects of each of these areas within the application that lend themselves to abstracted uses. While List View may be used most of the time for viewing a list of data, this isn’t forced upon you.

FileMaker’s layout parts are simply parts of your display area which can be used in creative ways. In this video, I showcase how I’ve used the body area of a List View in order to maintain statically positioned Header and Footer areas while treating the body as a single form view.

There are also creative ways to use Sub-summary parts by conditionally showing or hiding them as desired. This is commonly called “Sorting on a garbage field” - or, at least I’m calling it that.

If you’re looking to expand your creative thinking with how data can be displayed within FileMaker Pro, then this video will certainly have what you’re looking for.

Personally, I’m all about the time-savings. I think most people are. If I can accomplish anything, without sacrificing quality, in a shorter period of time I’ll take it!

Well, this video is going to be worth its weight in gold if you’ve spent any amount of time within FileMaker’s Layout mode doing a ton of repetitious tasks working with layout objects.

You see, FileMaker is a very powerful tool, but, it does have its own shortcomings. It suffers from a serious degree of “dialogitis”. You often have to drill down through so many dialogs it can take hours to implement an interface which uses a lot of similar elements which only change by a tiny degree - typically by a simple incrementation.

This is where you stop and say “Isn’t there a better way to do this?” Why YES! There is. Using a very simple tool, built in FileMaker, and a freely available plug-in, we can save many hundreds (maybe even thousands) of hours of development time over the course of a FileMaker career. This video will show you how!