It doesn’t matter what route you take if you don’t have a destination
-or-
Trigger happy
One thing that I really like about the direction that FileMaker has been going in since version 9 has been how the programming environment now encourages of the use of native UI features in FileMaker in highly customized solutions. Those of us who have been developing prior to FileMaker 9 – or those of us who have inherited solutions built before 9 – know all too well what it means to lock down the Status Area and then build core UI elements from scratch to replace the lost functionality. Many developer-hours have been spent to ‘reinvent’ features that were already in FileMaker, but in prior versions couldn’t be modified well enough to work in certain situations.
A clear, obvious example of this is the Toolbar. Almost every single ‘professional’ system I have worked with by default hides the Toolbar, and then the developer is forced to reinvent the forward and back buttons, the book/rolodex widget, and every other element of the Toolbar using buttons and scripts on the layout itself. What a waste of time!
Thanks to David Hollander for presenting last night! It was great to have an overview of a real-world solution optimized with 10-specific best practices techniques.
David walked through some techniques we’ve seen applied elsewhere – extensive use of script triggers to drive the UI, modular programming, some real world examples of Set Field By Name. There was one especially clever use of Custom Menus to create true modal dialog layouts that can’t be closed by clicking the X box. I’ll ask David to share that one, maybe in an example file.
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.
Jason sat down with Matt O’Dell for a brief conversation about some of the examples he planned to present to the user group yesterday. They also discussed Bento 3, field encryption and iPhoto integration. And the iPhone!
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