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Our Library of Videos
One of the best parts of developing within FileMaker Pro is that you don’t need to create every single thing from scratch. For example, having a Popover widget at the ready for immediate use in any layout is a really big benefit. It’s an automatic space saver.
However, what FileMaker doesn’t have built-in are certain features you might expect in most modern day software. How about a tagging feature which allows users to tag records and find those records on demand. This is something which isn’t built into FileMaker Pro. So you have to create the feature.
Well, we can certainly build one into any system within a short amount of time. Knowing how to use FileMaker’s Hide Calculation, Button Bars and script triggers allows for a very nice feature addition.
In this video, I’ll show you how to integrate a user-friendly dynamic record tagging solution which can be used in any FileMaker database. It takes advantage of the default checkbox widget and can be modified to suit your solution’s needs very easily. Sit back and relax as we learn more about using FileMaker to provide valuable user features!
FileMaker Database analysis has been around since the days when FileMaker made its meta data available through its Database Design Report - or DDR for short.
The report, for as long as I can recall, has been available in the human readable HTML format and also in the machine language format of XML.
Various developers have always made use of this verbose collection of tidbits about a database, but none have made it as fast as FMPerception. This newly released database analysis tool is the fastest information tool possible for answering questions about FileMaker Pro systems.
If you have any type of question about what’s used where and how within your database, then the fastest answers will come from FMPerception. Its especially helpful when working on a larger system or working within a team and you want to track what others have done to the solution.
This video provides a walkthrough of how to use FMPerception and how you can integrate it into your everyday development workflow.
When you’re in the “zone” while developing, it feels really good to get stuff done. You feel like you’re “flow”-ing through the problems and simply knocking them out one by one.
That feeling which comes from achieving “flow” is often hard to have when you hit situations where you feel like you’re being hindered by the environment or a lack of knowledge. Having to stop for research or fumbling through the development environment is one of those necessary evils. It’s the learning part that takes the time and being super familiar with the environment is when the “flow” arrives - ultimately, it’s a great feeling.
This week’s video is all about finding that “flow” much quicker within FileMaker. Having worked within the environment for a couple of decades, I can say you really only have to focus on the new stuff as it comes out. You’re not overwhelmed by all the other stuff you know you don’t know. This degree of leverage really affords a great sense of developmental confidence.
If learning how to “flow” within FileMaker is one of your own objectives, then allow me to show you some of my personal tips and tricks when it comes to getting stuff done quickly within FileMaker Pro.
As FileMaker Inc adds new features and functionality to FileMaker, it’s really easy for older projects to start to feel like they’re aging pretty quickly. Fortunately, one of the easiest fixes to make is to give things a brand new look and feel.
The process, however, of going about a re-theming isn’t always as easy as it seems. You’ve got new layout objects which may have been added and there are a ton of “older tricks” which may be replaced with newer ways of doing things.
Without going down the rabbit hole of a complete do-over, you can start re-theming with a good starter theme.
In this video, I showcase how I tackle the project of starting a new project or re-theming and existing solution. It’s a process which can put new life into an older project. You just need to have a good place to start and a way to approach the process. That’s what this particular video is all about. Taking full advantage of FileMaker’s Theming tools!
Nothing screams responsive more than text which grows or shrinks based on the device upon which it’s being viewed. The sad part of the previous statement is that FileMaker does not provide a native way of doing this. There’s no Conditional Formatting which says when Get ( WindowContentWidth ) > 768 scale the font size by 120%.
There is, however, a quaint little trick you can do with a few of FileMaker’s native functions along with a powerful Custom Function named CustomList. When you know how to piece things together, you can easily accomplish native responsive text within FileMaker.
This inside information is very valuable when you’re designing for a number of mobile devices. You can, for example, design a splash or a floating dialog layout and have its text content scale respectively of the device it’s being viewed upon.
Your 16pt text for the iPhone will easily become 34pt text for the iPad Pro. It’s a simple matter of knowing how to natively scale the text responsively. Fortunately, as a subscriber of this site, you’ll know how to do this in very short time!
Learning how to efficiently create scripts within FileMaker is a never ending process. It's a balance of leveraging what you know and mixing in newly added features along with new ways of doing things. Optimization and cleanup will always be part of the ever growing software solution.
In this video, I present the topic of using utility scripts in order to save precious development time. You know, those reusable scripts which prevent you from writing unique and dedicated scripts for every possible scenario in which the user will interact with your solution.
They're the scripts which end up saving you a ton of time and get used over and over again. They can be used stand-alone or they can be called by other scripts. But, no matter how they are used, it's certain they are valuable pieces of reusable code.
If saving time and reducing the number of scripts you write is of any interest, then this video will have the information you need.
FileMaker 15 was released on May 10th 2016 and includes a few key new technologies.
While much of the focus was on the mobile end of things, there are some speed improvements along with some convenience features which will make working in FileMaker 15 just a bit more enjoyable!
FileMaker Inc. released version 15 on May 10th. Did you miss the news? If so, then here’s a video which goes through the shortlist of new features.
One of the biggest changes was internal in terms of how FileMaker is saving cached data and layouts. FileMaker is now maintaining more resources after closing files so that opening a solution will seem MUCH faster. This is probably where a significant amount of development effort and dollars were spent.
You know, just laying in some ground work to make things perceptively faster for end users and developers. Now, if they will only give us developers control over local caching on a Layout-by-layout basis!
The number of new features, from a developer, perspective is pretty small. Unless you really need some of the new mobile related features, I’d say the biggest benefit to a FileMaker developer is the nicer colorful icons in Layout mode and the culmination of the various tweaks. Hopefully, the next annual release will contain a ton of wiz-bang features made just for developers. Regardless of meager feature additions, the developer perception when working on a remotely hosted database will be pretty significant!
As software users become more and more familiar with various UX methods, it becomes more and more desirable to emulate those methods within your FileMaker solutions. Common patterns such as tab panels and scrolling lists are a piece of cake and native to FileMaker.
Some of the more recent implementations are simple and super easy, like Popovers for example. However, other implementations can be a bit complex and require those ever necessary bits of deep knowledge about how FileMaker works behind the scenes.
In this video, I showcase a pretty straight-forward implementation of your standard iOS paging between views. It’s when you’re going to drill-down a few levels then allow the user to “back out” from where they came. Using the knowledge in this video and the associated technique file will provide you with a lot of insight into how close you can get to the real thing!
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.
One of the best new features added to version 13 of FileMaker was the Hide Calculation. Not only does it allow you to hide any layout element as needed, but it provides access to the calc engine for creating any $local or $$GLOBAL variables on a layout-by-layout basis. Knowing that all layout elements pass through the hide calculation before being rendered to the user is also a helpful thing to know.
In this video, I’ll walk you through the process of using the Hide calculation in order to make a layout change the provided feature set based on the mode the window is in. When switching between Browse mode and Find mode, there’s a number of things you can do to assist the user in understanding what the current context is and what they can do while in that context.
Not only does this take advantage of FileMaker’s native feature set, but provides you with an unlimited opportunity to make your user interface that much easier to understand.