December 15: 5th Annual Year End Bonanza User Group Meeting!

Greetings FileMaker Enthusiasts,

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.

414 Commerce Dr., Suite 150, Fort Washington, PA 19034
Google Map: http://tinyurl.com/37mhhh

This is our Fifth Annual Year End Bonanza!

Please RSVP here if you are planning to attend this meeting:
http://www.fmpug.com/rsvp.php?eventID=947

THE TOPICS:

We’ll be continuing our tradition of reviewing the 2009 predictions we made last year, and making predictions for the coming year. There are no formal presentations, but feel free to break out laptops while you nosh. Talking about FileMaker is, of course, inevitable – but not required! Mainly this is an opportunity to wrap up the year with some good food, networking, gossip and giveaways. If you’ve never been to one of our meetings, this is a good time to start! We’d love to have you.

I’d also like to note that this meeting marks two milestones:

1. It’s our 5th anniversary meeting, and

2. Someone who walks through the door will be our 1,000th attendee since the inception of the group.  Whether that gets you more than a pat on the back we’re still working out…

THE FOOD:

Catered food will provided, courtesy of FileMaker Inc. – thanks to our regional rep Jason Fiske for this! If you’re sick of pizza this is the meeting to come to.

THE RAFFLE PRIZES:

The vendors we’ve contacted for giveaways have been very generous this year (as always). This year we’re concentrating on people who have presented to the user group or will be presenting in 2010, with a few additional friendly folks. To that end, we have donations from:

360Works
ProofGroup/SeedCode
Ben Waldie/Automated Workflows
Molly Connolly/Thorsen Consulting
SolutionMakers
RealEVO

…and there may be more as we line things up.

Thanks to all of the participating companies for their generosity! We’ll be raffling these off over the course of the evening.

The raffle will be structured a bit differently this year – you’ll each get a number of tickets, which you can dump into one raffle for something you really want, or spread out among all the prizes. FMPug members will get double tickets: go to www.fmpug.com for membership.

We’ll also have a table out with brochures and discounts from the vendors, and as we go through the raffle items we’ll discuss them in depth.

In the grand holiday tradition of “I like your present better than mine”, exchanging prizes with each other is, as usual, encouraged.

This is what we have in the offing (with possibly more to come):

Ben Waldie/Automated Workflows:
http://www.automatedworkflows.com/

1 Ultimate Productivity Automator Action Pack

This Automator Action Pack contains A COMPLETE SET of Automated Workflows, LLC’s Automator actions for Leopard and Snow Leopard, for use with a variety of applications, including FileMaker Pro, Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop, QuarkXPress, and more!
http://www.automatedworkflows.com/software/automator_actions/ultimate.html

1 Copy of Automator for Snow Leopard: Visual Quickstart Guide

Automator for Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard: Visual QuickStart Guide uses a combination of task-based instruction and strong visuals to teach intermediate Macintosh users how to automate repetitive, time-consuming tasks with the Automator application that is included with Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. Automator comes with many useful automated routines (called actions) preinstalled, for lots of popular applications, that do things like remove empty playlists from iTunes or add attachments to Mac Mail. The real power of Automator lies in mixing and matching these actions to have them do exactly the job you want. They’re put together in a string of actions known as a workflow. Author Ben Waldie introduces readers to how Automator works, and then helps them assemble and use Automator workflows.
http://www.automatedworkflows.com/books/automator_vqs10.6.html

ProofGroup/SeedCode:
http://www.proofgroup.com/
http://www.seedcode.com/

1 Copy of NinjaCal

A mini-calendar that does the heavy lifting while looking great

Handling dates, especially date ranges, can be tricky. FileMaker’s built in pop-up calendar is a good step in that your users don’t need to type in dates by hand, but it isn’t as friendly as the persistent date selectors available, for example, on travelocity’s web site, or in Google analytics. Those sites use persistent mini-calendars so that users can see which dates and date ranges they’ve selected.
Now NinjaCal makes it easy to get use the same kind of mini calendars in your FileMaker solutions. And you can use NinjaCal both to *select* dates, and to *reveal* the dates represented in your data.
http://www.seedcode.com/

Thorsen Consulting/Molly Connolly:
http://thorsenconsulting.com/
http://filemakerrecruiter.com/

FileMaker Coaching Session (1 hour)

Curious about how your skills stack up? Looking for some career direction? Wondering how to grow your FileMaker consulting business? Molly Connolly is a seasoned FileMaker developer who is working with other developers to help them them either start their own consulting companies, find in-house positions, or grow their current business. She’s offering a free one hour coaching session to help you explore how you can make 2010 your best year yet!

Molly is a member of the FileMaker Business Alliance, a frequent speaker at the annual FileMaker Developer’s Conference and a steering committee member of Pause On Error.
http://filemakerrecruiter.com/

360Works:
http://www.360works.com/

1 Workgroup License of either Plastic, Textractor or SuperContainer (winner’s choice)

The 360Works Plastic plugin makes it easy to process secure, SSL-encrypted credit card payments from FileMaker Pro and Filemaker Server.
http://www.360works.com/credit-card-plugin/

The 360Works Textractor plugin extracts plain text from non-plain files, like PDFs and Microsoft Word documents, as well as exif data from jpgs. It is an extremeley simple plugin to use: simply pass the local path or URL of a file, and it returns the text in that file.
http://www.360works.com/textractor/

SuperContainer is the easiest way to upload, view and download files to and from any FileMaker database, plus it offers numerous advantages over FileMaker’s built-in container field: faster speeds, smaller file sizes, web browser uploads, and cross-platform file path compatability.
http://www.360works.com/supercontainer/

SolutionMakers:
http://www.solutionmakers.com/

1 copy of 123Sync

Unleash the powerful capabilities of accounting synchronization with 123sync! Stop the redundant re-entry of data from your FileMaker or SQL files into QuickBooks accounting using our simple point-and-click configuration wizard, you can add powerful integration to your existing FileMaker or SQL solutions in AS LITTLE AS AN HOUR (based on files that conform to development best practices)!
http://secure.solutionmakers.com/store/index.lasso?page=detail&id=187

Real EVO:
http://www.realevo.com/
http://www.filemakerdesign.com/

3 copies of FM Expression Editor

FM Expression Editor is the simple and smart way to edit FileMaker calculations and scripts. It features syntax highlighting, intelligent content assistance, quick function look-up and database design report integration. All of these features combine to provide you with an environment that lets you write scripts and calculations faster than ever before.
http://www.filemakerdesign.com/expression

Looking forward to seeing you next week!

Best,

Colin

Chapter Coordinator