ISO FileMaker Magazine

When your average knowledge worker starts developing with FileMaker Pro, there’s a lot of background and history which may be missing. Especially, when it comes to making certain decisions about schema. We’ve all been at that level at some point in the learning curve, and the process of reworking things is just par for the course.

The FileMaker environment makes it so easy to simply add a new calculated value. It’s even part of our mental processing. “Oh, I need to calculate this.”

The problem, however, with FileMaker’s simplicity can be its detriment to performance. It’s far too easy to sprinkle in unstored calculations all throughout your database systems.

In other database environments, the notion of an integrated calculation doesn’t even exist. The database is simply the storage part of the whole equation and may not offer much logic at all. You might have stored procedures, but these aren’t part and parcel with the whole environment like they are within FileMaker.

In this video, I go over some of the tools and tricks I use in order to evaluate the performance level of any given database. Using this knowledge helps you to create more efficient systems which will perform better as time goes by. Remember the saying “Less is more.”? It may benefit your database when it comes to fields and layouts.

When developing within tools like Xcode, the sky’s the limit in terms of providing user interaction and user feedback. Fortunately, with FileMaker, we have access to many of the core interaction elements from iOS. Popovers are a great example of a critical iOS UI element.

When FileMaker 13 was released we got the wonderful Popover objects. To follow that up within FileMaker 14, we got the new objects named Button Bars. These new objects were an enhancement on the ages old Button objects. The cool addition to these legacy objects was the fact that we can use multiple segments (buttons) within Button Bars. Each of these segments can then take advantage of the existing features. They can simply act as buttons or become Popovers in their own right.

The primary, and key distinction with Button Bars over standard buttons is access to FileMaker’s calculation engine. With access to the calc engine, we can now do a lot of things to the data shown on those buttons which can’t be done with standard buttons.

When you consider that a Button Bar can have any number of segments from one to 400 (which I wouldn’t suggest) you can think of a lot of creative uses for not just user interaction, but for user feedback and information display as well.

This video showcases a number of creative uses for FileMaker’s Button Bar objects.

Slideout menus have been around for quite some time in the mobile world. They often come alongside an icon of three short horizontal bars which are commonly called a hamburger menu. Called as such because it looks like two buns, with one above and one below the meat in between. This icon is also suspiciously similar to a "List view" icon in our familiar world of FileMaker.

While the UI pattern still has a lot of use in the mobile world, it's becoming increasingly "out of fashion" and referred to as a basement menu when considered for the purpose of navigation. Regardless of whether the pattern is useful as a navigational method, the know-how behind implementing within FileMaker allows us to use that knowledge in various other ways as well.

In this video I showcase the implementation of a slideout menu for the purpose of discussing all the critical bits to knowing how it's implemented. This knowledge will allow you to take advantage of how a slider panel can be used to disclose further information which may be intentionally hidden within your user interface. Understanding how this UI pattern is implemented within FileMaker will improve your proficiency with creating solutions in our favorite database application.

Emulating features and design functionality found within iOS apps can be both frustrating and rewarding in FileMaker. Frustrating because you can't just replicate anything you see in iOS, yet rewarding when you pull something off and feel like FileMaker is that much closer to a native looking application. The biggest benefit with FileMaker being you likely created the solution with a speed which simply can't be had when building the same with the native iOS APIs.

Simply put, FileMaker saves a ton of time when creating an application which is heavily data focused. Managing data and programming the interaction with that data may take double or even triple the amount of time when not using an IDE like FileMaker.

This video is all about recreating a nice UI feature I found within sliders in an iOS app named Strava. Instead of using the standard plain and boring dots at the bottom of a slider panel, it uses creative looking icons. Of course, I set out to emulate this look and feel and accomplished it quite successfully. As I set out to accomplish the task, I also found other methods which make the whole process super simple to accomplish. Use the information in this video and the provided technique file to enhance your own use of slider panels.

[UPDATE] Forget about what I mention in the later part of the video about hacking the dots. I forgot about where you could control the size of them. It is hidden within the HUD panel for adding and removing new panels. The size setting is right there. I thought I had remembered seeing it and I searched all over in the Inspector and couldn't find it when shooting the video. :(