Monthly Archive for July, 2009

7/28 Design Critique Meeting Recap

By: Colin Keefe

Published on July 29, 2009. 3 Comments

Well, our first attempt to stream our meetings was a resounding success-slash-FAIL.  We had about 16 actual-real-life people in the room and a consistent remote viewership of about a dozen people (and about 20 all told over the course of the evening), with lots of chat feedback from the remote audience.  All of that was great.  But when I went to save the recording: FAIL.  Too embarrassing to go into detail (let’s just say I thought that CANCEL button meant, er, something else).  Better luck next time, I suppose, though I’m disappointed.

We’ll be trying a few things differently next go round. Aside from not breaking things, we’ll look into better views of the presentations themselves, rather than a shot of a darkened room with blobs moving around.  Options include picture-in-picture or two simultaneous streams, or dumping the “room view” altogether when the presentation is heavily projection-driven.

In any case:  the meeting itself was very informative and dynamic, with lots of participation from the in-person audience.

Continue reading ‘7/28 Design Critique Meeting Recap’

Published in Design Critique Sessions, FileMaker, Meeting Recaps and Meetings by Colin Keefe. Tags: Tags: , , , , , , .

uStreaming on for tonight

By: Colin Keefe

Published on July 28, 2009. 0 Comments

For those of you not in the Philly area, we’re going to broadcast tonight’s meeting starting at 6 PM here:

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/philly-filemaker-user-group

The Design Critique session is pretty informal – basically a bunch of code heads putting on their User Experience hats and looking at solutions from that perspective.  Hope you can join us.

Published in Design Critique Sessions, FileMaker and Meetings by Colin Keefe. Tags: Tags: , , .

REMINDER: User Group Meeting tonight – we may be uStreaming this

By: Colin Keefe

Published on July 28, 2009. 0 Comments

Just a reminder that we’re meeting tonight at 6PM.  If I can get this windows LifeCam VX6000 to work with Parallels, we’ll be uStreaming the meeting.  I’ll post a link later if things work out.

Hope to see you tonight. – Colin

Announcement Highlights

- 2nd Semiannual Design Critique and Discussion July 28

— Dan Stein and Loreli Voltmer present

— Stump the Chump experts

- News: FREE FileMaker 1/2 Day Seminar August 6: Better Data, Better Decisions with FileMaker

- About the Philadelphia FileMaker User Group

Continue reading ‘REMINDER: User Group Meeting tonight – we may be uStreaming this’

Published in Design Critique Sessions, FileMaker and Meetings by Colin Keefe. Tags: Tags: , , , .

New FMPUG FileMaker Developer Group starting in Nashville TN

By: Colin Keefe

Published on July 24, 2009. 0 Comments

Just a quick post to mention that Bob Patin of Longterm Solutions is trying to get a local FMPug chapter going in Nashville.   “Music City FMPUG” is the name I last heard thrown around.  This is a fairly under-served region when it comes to FMPug representation, so this is a great thing for FileMaker and for Tennessee.

If you’re in the Tennessee region and are looking to hook up with other FileMaker developers, get in touch with Bob ASAP, so he can get an accurate gauge of interest level.

Bob Patin:

twitter account (bobpatin)

info@longtermsolutions.com

Published in Uncategorized by Colin Keefe. Tags:

Themed Color Palettes for Mac

By: Colin Keefe

Published on July 21, 2009. 0 Comments

Earlier this year I mentioned a method for sharing color palettes on a Mac, useful if you have multiple developers working on a project and you need to keep everyone on the same color scheme.

Recently on Twitter someone posted a link to Mondrianum (FREE from Lithoglyph).  I’m not a habitual downloader of the latest/greatest, but this was such a simple, elegant and useful tool that I thought I’d share – I think this thing is great.

Essentially it pulls content from the Adobe Kuler online community into the Mac system-wide color picker, making the color themes available in ANY Mac app that uses the system color picker (Which FileMaker does).

Once you’ve installed it, you can select any color theme and either view it online, or add it as a new Apple Color List.

If you add it as a color list, then you’ll have a new Color List in your dropdown menu in your Palette tab, and can start playing around.  Download it now, and have fun!

Published in FileMaker, Mac OS and Tips and tricks by Colin Keefe. Tags: Tags: , , , , .

Opportunities reminder

By: Colin Keefe

Published on July 17, 2009. 0 Comments

Just a quick reminder of upcoming training/learning opportunities:

7/21 -FileMaker 101 1-day session, offered by IT Solutions

7/22-23 – FileMaker Intermediate, offered by IT Solutions

7/28 – Philly FileMaker User Group Meeting: 2nd Semi-annual Design Critique/Discussion, free, sponsored by IT Solutions

7/30 – Survivor or Statistic Seminar #2, offered by IT Solutions – a comprehensive overview on how to plan for any type of disaster that could impact your business.

8/3-6 – FileMaker Training Series (FTS), offered by IT Solutions

Go find out more about our training offerings and schedules here.

8/6 – Free FileMaker Seminar – Better Data, Better Decisions, sponsored by IT Solutions – this event is especially oriented toward users wanting to learn more about what can be done in FileMaker, so please come even if you’re not a developer.

8/13-16. FileMaker DevCon in San Francisco, which is rapidly approaching - Go register here.

Published in Conferences, Design Critique Sessions, FileMaker, FileMaker Inc., IT Solutions Consulting, Meetings and Training by Colin Keefe. Tags: Tags: , .

PauseOnError Day 1

By: Colin Keefe

Published on July 16, 2009. 3 Comments

My wife, 3 year old son and I hopped in the car at 6:30 this morning and headed north from Philly to NYC.  I was headed to PauseOnError; Andi and Sam were going to hang with our Brooklyn friends, some of whom we hadn’t seen since we moved from Brooklyn in 2007.

I arrived at the Ace Hotel – a gorgeous, hipsterish old/new world style hotel on 29th street – close to 9 AM and squeezed into the crowd in Molly Connolly’s room for the intro session.  I then spent the better part of the day hopping around the various sessions and talking.  The mood was pretty festive and congenial, like partying with a bunch of geniuses.

Continue reading ‘PauseOnError Day 1′

Published in Conferences and FileMaker by Colin Keefe. Tags: Tags: , , , .

More on the PauseOnError FileMaker UnConference…

By: Colin Keefe

Published on July 15, 2009. 0 Comments

I mentioned earlier here that there’s something very interesting being organized up on NYC – a participant-driven, seat-of-the-pants UnConference on all things FileMaker, called PauseOnError.  It runs July 16-17 – which means it starts tomorrow.

Since Ernest Koe, John Sindelar and Andy Gaunt started glomming this together less than three weeks ago, it’s blossomed into a very real entity, with over 20 presentation sessions and now 60 RSVPs.  Some of the sessions may spill out to local coffee shops, or even to Madison Square Park, weather depending.

And now there’s talk of spawning the idea in Portland and London in 2010.

All in all it’s a testament to the power of social media (which until recently I reserved some skepticism for) and to community-driven efforts (which I’ve always believed in full-on).  I’ll be blogging/tweeting (@phillyfilemaker) to a certain extent on Thursday to provide some basic reporting of the event, and I’ll try to write a more comprehensive recap when I get back.

There are still plenty of open slots in the schedule for presenting (the schedule’s been broken into three session tracks), so if you have some crazy idea you want to toss out in front of your peers, now would be a good time to head up (or down, or across) to Manhattan.

Seriously – if you’ve got a light schedule tomorrow and/or Friday, get to the Ace Hotel now.

Published in Conferences and FileMaker by Colin Keefe. Tags: Tags: , , .

FileMaker 10.0v3 Released today

By: Colin Keefe

Published on July 14, 2009. 3 Comments

FileMaker 10.0v3 (mac/pc) is available for download as of today.  Also made available is a new Server rev (10.0v2) for Macs.

It is HIGHLY recommended you apply this update.

The v3 updater addresses a number of minor issues, as well as two issues with the recovery process to make the process more reliable.  One issue was a pretty esoteric bug that only surfaced when hosting a recovered file whose original file referenced custom functions in auto-enter calcs – if you’ve never hosted a recovered file, this one would have been invisible to you.  Of course, you know you SHOULDN’T host recovered files.  Right?

Also worth noting is that the .DBF import/export format has been added back in – it was removed with 10.0v1, along with a number of other formats that went way back to the early days of FileMaker (anyone EVER import an SYLK file?  DIF? Anyone?).  In the case of .DBF files, however, there were a number of people still integrating with other systems that used the .DBF file format; they asked to pretty please have this format back, and FileMaker apparently heard.

The complete changelog is here.

Published in FileMaker Inc. by Colin Keefe. Tags: Tags: , .

Join us July 28: 2nd Semiannual Design Critique and Discussion

By: Colin Keefe

Published on July 13, 2009. 0 Comments

Announcement Highlights

- 2nd Semiannual Design Critique and Discussion July 28

— Dan Stein and Loreli Voltmer present

— Stump the Chump experts

- News: FREE FileMaker 1/2 Day Seminar August 6: Better Data, Better Decisions with FileMaker

- About the Philadelphia FileMaker User Group

____________________________________________________________________

Greetings FileMaker Enthusiasts,

Our next Philadelphia FileMaker User Group meeting has been scheduled for Tuesday evening, July 28th 2009 at 6:00 PM.

The meeting will be held at the IT Solutions Fort Washington Office:

+  414 Commerce Dr., Suite 150, Fort Washington, PA 19034

+  Google Map: http://tinyurl.com/37mhhh

As always, pizza and soft drinks will be provided.

Please RSVP here if you are planning to attend this meeting:

http://www.fmpug.com/rsvp.php?eventID=871

2nd Semiannual Design Critique and Discussion

For our July 28th meeting we’re going to hold our 2nd semiannual Design Critique and Discussion session.

Dan Stein (http://www.dss-db.com/) and Loreli Voltmer (http://www.mataac.org/) have both agreed to present projects they have worked on and open the floor for critique and discussion.  Each will have about 30 minutes of floor time.

The presenters will be providing a certain amount of discussion framing – namely what problems they’d like to talk about.  But generally speaking we are going to be focusing mainly on high-level topics:

What decisions were made to model the business/org the project was for?

What could other design avenues offer?

What design paths had to be ruled out?

What are the best and worst aspects of the system, and what lessons can be taken into future projects?

In short, a friendly critique and open discussion, learning from the imperfection of real-world examples, communal brainstorming, with the object of taking away from the dialogue ideas for our own design practices.

Stump the Chump – Sit down with an expert for advice/troubleshooting

After the main presentation, during the meet, greet and eat portion of the evening, two seasoned developers will make themselves – and their laptops – available to answer any questions members might have, technical and otherwise.  This is an excellent opportunity to pick the brains of FileMaker talent and help you move forward with your own projects!

This month our experts-at-your-disposal are:

Colin Keefe (IT Solutions Consulting: http://www.itsolutions-inc.com/)

David Hollander (Combined Fields Consulting: http://combinedfields.com/)

We’re anticipating this feature of the evening to span about 15 minutes; longer if the developers agree. As usual we rotate talent from meeting to meeting, and feel free to put in your two cents here – this is meant to be fun and collaborative.

News: FREE 1/2 day Seminar August 6:


Better Data, Better Decisions with FileMaker

IT Solutions Consulting is presenting a FREE 1/2 day Seminar on August 6.  It’s conveniently located next to 30th St. Station downtown at the new Hub Cira Centre, and covers some great topics for making your solution even more indispensable to your organization – through dashboards, document management, reporting and much more.

More info here:

http://www.heartlandtechnologies.com/Newsletters/Customers/ITSolutions/FileMakerSeminar_June09.htm

You really DON’T want to miss this.

About the Philadelphia FileMaker User Group:

The Philadelphia FileMaker User Group was founded in 2004 as an initiative by FileMaker Business Alliance Platinum member IT Solutions Consulting.  The group’s goal is to provide an open forum for FileMaker developers and those interested in FileMaker to meet, brainstorm and network.

We hold meetings the 4th Tuesday of every month at 6PM, in the office of IT Solutions Consulting, Inc., at 414 Commerce Drive, Suite 150, Fort Washington PA.

Meetings are open to all, regardless of background and there’s no charge to attend.

Please subscribe to our Mailing List to get announcements on upcoming meetings. The list is set to Announce only, so the volume is typically between one and 2 emails a month.

http://fmpug.com/mailman/listinfo/philly_fmpug.com/

You can read our blog to get updates and meeting recaps:

http://www.phillyfilemaker.org/

We’re also an FMPug Chapter:  http://www.fmpug.com/ Consider membership today, especially if you purchase training, plugins, 3rd party products, or web/filemaker hosting – FMPug membership affords considerable discounts across a range of offerings.

Finally, The Philadelphia FileMaker User Group is hosted by:

IT Solutions Consulting, Inc.

Employee ownership – fueling our innovation, strengthening your business.

http://www.itsolutions-inc.com/

- Learn about our new FileMaker support offerings: FMAssist and FMAssure!

- www.itsolutions-inc.com/our_solutions/application_development/fm_assist.html

Published in Design Critique Sessions, FileMaker and Meetings by Colin Keefe. Tags: Tags: , , .