Our next meeting will be February 23, at 6 PM, at the IT Solutions office. An official announce will go out closer to the meeting date, but here’s the blurb:
David Hollander makes databases for medical researchers. He’ll demo a project for managing lab samples that incorporates cool features in FM10 to make it as intuitive and goof-proof as can be. You’ll see how script triggers, conditional formatting, custom menus, and other interface tricks are put to work. Newcomers will come away learning new techniques; and veterans can compare their own favorite methods to David’s.
David Hollander is a longtime active member of the Philly FileMaker User Group, and we’re pleased to have him present.
Check out the following blog post for a written recap from Pause On Error, the FileMaker unconference in Portland. This has a little more info about the back story and where the movement itself may be headed. This post is available on an IT blog that is hosted by IT Solutions: http://bit.ly/aIzZkx
At last week’s meeting I presented some FileMaker performance analysis findings that were compiled by Jason Young, Mighty Data (Denver, CO). He had shared them during his session “What’s Faster?” at the recent PauseOnError unconference in Portland, OR a few weeks back. Jason sent a follow-up email about some of his findings and some tidbits he’s learned since Pause On Error, along with the slides from his presentation, which are attached here. If you weren’t at the meeting, check out the meeting video on an earlier post to gain some context for this update (fast forward to the 54:20 mark).
Jason Mundok gave a great overview of the Portland PauseOnError Unconference to about 20 folks. We also hashed out some plans for the Member page of this blog. Ustream recording below:
I was fortunate to attend day one of Pause on Error in Portland and had a chance to chat with John Sindelar (SeedCode) and Ernest Koe (Proof) about what it was like to organize Pause II. We debuted this interview at the Philadelphia FileMaker User Group meeting held at the IT Solutions office in Fort Washington.
Problem:
Every once in a while, I have a client say, “I want to have the modification date on the layout. Oh, but I only care when the <<Insert Field Name here>> has been modified”.
Filemaker has a built in auto enter option on a field called ‘Modification’. This lets you create a field that gives you information about the last time the record was modified. You can capture any of the following: User Name, Account Name, Date, Time or Timestamp. This is a great function, but it updates the value whenever any field in the record is modified – in other words, it doesn’t give feedback as to which field was modified.
This is a side note – nothing to do with the upcoming meeting on the 26th (you have rsvped for that, right? Details here and RSVP here ).
Andy Gaunt at FMPug has generously offered to set up a second listserv for us, for group members to engage in discussion. It’s called PhillyFMTalk.
It’s opt-in; you won’t get on the list unless you explicitly send a subscribe email. Use it to talk about FileMaker, network, suggest meeting topics/agenda, post availability for work, or…whatever you like, really. The point is to get you all engaged with each other outside of the monthly meetings. It’s not meant to replace the FMPugTalk mailing list or Technet – this is meant as a purely local, group oriented resource.
The existing listserv will remain announce-only, so if that’s all you’re interested in, you don’t need to do a thing.
To subscribe to the new list, look for the subscribe links in the sidebar to the right.
On another note: I’ve set up a tab on the blog for Members (right overhead, yep, right…there!) and am mulling over what to do with it. So a good first topic for the PhillyFMTalk list might be what I should be doing with this space.
January 26th Meeting:
- Extended Stump the Chump: Bring in your code for troubleshooting!
- Pause On Error UnConference in Portland: Jason Mundok’s first hand report
Since a large part of our December meeting was given over to a discussion of the goals and direction of the group, this recap post serves the added function of discussing some of those goals and how we plan to work toward them.
Recap!
Two dozen FileMaker enthusiasts converged on the the IT Solutions office for the 5th Annual PFUG Year End Bonanza on December 15th.
We continued our annual tradition of vendor discussions and giveaways, of course – congratulations to Dan Stein, Todd Chronister, Walter Burns, Preston Cabe, Tim Lynott, Mike Ahern, Bryant Minard, Gale Raspen and Michael Reddy for winning bonanza prizes from our generous sponsors! And a big thanks to SolutionMakers, Ben Waldie, ProofGroup and Seed Code, Thorsen Consulting, 360Works and Real EVO for participating and contributing to our event.
Our 2008 predictions for 2009 were, as usual, mostly wrong, but I don’t think anyone can be faulted for not guessing all the twists and turns 2009 held in store for us. We’ll have to wait until December 2010 before we can weigh in on the latest batch – though I somehow doubt “BJ and the Bear” will make it to the big screen this year (sorry, Jason).
Our next Philadelphia FileMaker Developer Group meeting has been scheduled for Tuesday evening, December 15th 2008 at 6:00 PM. The meeting will be held at the IT Solutions Fort Washington Office.
