This is a rare meeting with two FileMaker Inc representatives sharing the stage.  They’ll be reviewing the state of FileMaker Go and how it’s currently being used in the field, using real-world cases.

414 Commerce Dr., Suite 150, Fort Washington, PA 19034
Google Map

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

http://www.fmpug.com/rsvp.php?eventID=1228

FILEMAKER GO: ONE YEAR LATER

Andrew LeCates and Matthew O’Dell of FileMaker Inc.

It was over a year ago when FileMaker Go was released to the public. Since that time many clients and developers have built wonderful solutions that extend their desktop databases and take advantage of the unique mobility and hardware that iOS devices provide.

Systems Engineer Matt O’Dell and Director of Systems Engineering Andy LeCates from FileMaker will present to us some of the lessons learned over the year in developing for this new mobile platform. Matt will present the basics of FileMaker Go, what things have changed over the past year, and how to use different features specific to this device. Andy will demonstrate some real life solutions built for FileMaker Go and how they solved unusual problems with the combination of iOS and FileMaker Go.

About the Presenters

Andrew LeCates

Andy manages the North American Systems Engineering team for FileMaker,Inc. For 20 years, he’s led FileMaker solutions deployment as a developer, teacher, evangelist, author, and consultant for customers around the world. He’s a veteran speaker and is FileMaker Pro Certified in 7,8,9,10, 11 and  an Authorized Trainer for the FileMaker Training Series track.

Matthew O’Dell

Matt is a systems engineer with FileMaker in the Northeast United States and Canada. Matt has been an avid FileMaker user for over 10 years now, and has been developing solutions for the past seven years. He started as an IT Manager for a small student based travel company in DeKalb, IL before moving to Soliant Consulting. While with Soliant, Matt developed applications for numerous clients, taught training courses, and participated as a member of their IT department. He has been with FileMaker, Inc. for nearly three years and works out of New York City. Certifications include FileMaker 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11 Certified Developer, FileMaker Training Series Authorized Trainer, and MySQL 5.0 Developer Certified.

 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/

Twitter here:

http://twitter.com/phillyfilemaker

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.

IT Solutions Consulting, Inc.
Employee ownership – fueling our innovation, strengthening your business.
http://www.itsolutions-inc.com/
Learn more about us on our new Videos/Blog Page!
http://www.itsolutions-inc.com/videos_blog/index.html

 

Our next Philadelphia FileMaker Developer Group meeting has been scheduled for Tuesday evening, August 30th 2011 at 6:00 PM. The meeting will be held at the IT Solutions Fort Washington Office.  (Please note: this is a schedule change.)

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

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

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

http://www.fmpug.com/rsvp.php?eventID=1212

2011 FileMaker DevCon Recap!

The sixteenth annual FileMaker Developer Convention was held in early August in San Diego CA.  We’ve just gotten back and can’t wait to share.  A record-breaking TEN Philly FileMaker User Group members attended this year, so this ought to be a very lively session.

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/

Twitter here:

http://twitter.com/phillyfilemaker

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 more about us on our new Videos/Blog Page!

http://www.itsolutions-inc.com/videos_blog/index.html

 

This year’s conference was held at the gorgeous San Diego Hilton Bayfront where we enjoyed temperatures in the 70s with low humidity and a pleasant breeze. The accommodations and facility was top notch, with plenty of space for the conference and all of the normal hotel patrons.

For me, it’s really about being together. This is an amazing and supportive community of people who share common interests, face similar hurdles, and are working toward many of the same goals. While the FileMaker online community is vibrant, nothing beats face time, and DevCon offers plenty of opportunities to hang out and chat with 1,000+ of your closest FileMaker friends! Here are some of my highlights from the 2011 FileMaker Developer Conference.

Performance

The three sessions that had the most impact for me this year all had to do with performance. FileMaker, Inc.’s Jon Thatcher kicked off the first slot on Wednesday, the first official conference day, with an “under the hood” session focused on WAN performance. He explored some of the behind-the-scenes changes that they are working on to improve WAN performance in future versions and explained the ins and outs of the FileMaker Server logs. Understanding the logs is the first step in analyzing and ultimately correcting performance issues.

On Thursday Mark Richman from Skeleton Key in St. Louis, MO presented “Practical Techniques for Improving FileMaker WAN Performance”. Mark shared some of the most “expensive” features in FileMaker (from a performance perspective) and how to work around them, or simply avoid them when deploying over a wide area network.

Jason Young from Terapico Data in Boulder, CO expanded on last year’s more general “What’s Faster” session with a focus this year on “What’s Faster for FileMaker Go”. Jason provided some comparative speed metrics when running FileMaker processes in FileMaker Go on an iPad locally, on a WLAN, and over 3G. The results in relation to each other were as expected with performance being worse over 3G than on a WLAN, and both being dramatically slower than a locally run process. Jason also shared a case study where performance was a major hurdle for  a FileMaker Go deployment. He explained what techniques they used to overcome performance issues by simply rethinking the way they approached certain features.

Some common themes emerged across all three of these sessions. Primarily, with more and more movement toward WAN deployments, FileMaker developers need to rethink some common practices based on an understanding of what causes performance to drag. For example, all three presenters talked about the increased use of one-to-one relationships to help keep tables thin, push fields that contain a lot of data out to related tables, and ultimately reduce the amount of data that needs to be pulled down from the server when records load.

This topic is very important for the development community right now and it’s great to see so much attention being placed on it. Thanks to Jon, Mark, and Jason for their hard work and for bringing real solutions for dealing with performance issues to the community.

FileMaker Feud

The most fun I had at a session this year was FileMaker Feud, presented by our friends at MightyData in Dallas, TX. This was one of several vendor sessions that gave vendors an opportunity to showcase their products and services. MightyData had some fun with their slot by recruiting eight contestants and two of their FileMaker coaches, Martha Zink and Anders Monsen, who competed as “families” guessing the most popular answers to many FileMaker related questions. The answers came from a survey sent out to the greater FileMaker community months in advance. Based on a tournament format, the winning team was then split up for a second round, and then those winners went head-to-head for the final rounds. In the end Laura Betz from Cross IT beat Lee Lukehart, SaavyData, in a suspense-filled final round that could have been the basis for a fine come-from-behind, underdog film! All contestants received great gifts, with the grand prize being a brand new iPad 2!

Next Year

The conference ended with the announcement that the 2012 FileMaker Developer Conference will be held in Miami, on July 16-19. If you are part of the FileMaker community but haven’t yet made it to a DevCon, do yourself a favor and try to get out to Miami next summer. You won’t regret it!

 

A particularly huge item that seemed to slip through the cracks of the new features list is:

iOS app developers may take advantage of the newly enhanced URL protocol from FileMaker for calling FileMaker Go. Using the URL protocol, developers can now specify a FileMaker Pro script and script parameters. This allows developers of commercial and in-house iOS applications to extend FileMaker Go databases and provide a wide spectrum of useful solutions such as bar code scanning.

Press Release

This means that you can write applications for iOS and call scripts in Filemaker using parameters. You can’t even do this in Filemaker Pro! Who needs to to use plugins on iOS, just use iOS apps, communication can go both ways by registering a url scheme for your own app that Filemaker can call to trigger actions.

Filemaker Go Update

- Take photos, add them to the database, and email as an attachment
- Convert records to PDF and email file from the database
- Save a copy of a database and email it as an attachment
- Import records from FileMaker Pro databases to FileMaker Go via scripts
- Be able to require users to re-log onto FileMaker Go after iPhone hibernates
- Solves compatibility issues running on iPhone

I think these have got to be some of the biggest requests on my list. I’m downloading as we speak.

 

Our next Philadelphia FileMaker User Group meeting has been scheduled for Tuesday evening, September 28th 2010 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://bit.ly/d7L05o

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=1085

INTRODUCING FILEMAKER GO!

[late breaking: FileMaker Go 1.1 is out!  Details here; if you weren’t planning on coming before, you might want to do a rethink.]

Introducing FileMaker Go With Matt O’Dell, Systems Engineer, FileMaker Inc.

FileMaker Go allows you to view, edit, and search your FileMaker Pro records on your iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad. Your existing FileMaker Pro layouts look amazing on the large iPad display screen – no modification is necessary for many solutions. FileMaker Go easily connects to databases hosted on FileMaker Server or FileMaker Pro via a local wireless network or over the Internet using Wi-Fi or 3G.

If you do not have access to FileMaker Server or will not have an Internet connection while you are on the go, simply copy your solutions directly to FileMaker Go using File Sharing in iTunes. While it is great to finally work with FileMaker Pro databases on the iPhone and iPad, there are many things to consider when deploying legacy systems to this platform. Many script steps are not supported, and the touch interface may require simplified layouts.

Attend this meeting to see FileMaker Go in action and learn best practices for deploying FileMaker Pro systems to this new platform.

About the Speaker

Matt O’Dell is a Systems Engineer with FileMaker in the Northeast. He has 10+ years experience using FileMaker and building web solutions. Along with being a certified FileMaker Developer, he also is an authorized FTS trainer and a certified MySQL 5.0 developer. Prior to working for FileMaker, Matt was an application developer, trainer, and tech support professional with Soliant Consulting in Chicago.

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/

Twitter here:

http://twitter.com/phillyfilemaker

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

 

I realize that many of you are in regions that, on initial consideration, might not seem fertile ground for a user group.  You may feel that being located in a smaller metropolitan area or rural region is an insurmountable roadblock to getting a group started.  What’s the point of holding a first meeting if there’s no one else around?

Your first step is finding the 2 or 3 or 10 people you can connect with and agree to meet in person. We’ll get into the meat and potatoes of managing the group later; there’s no point talking about it until you’ve got enough interest to fill at least the seats around a kitchen table or bar booth. Finding people is, admittedly, hard.  Luckily, there are plenty of online resources to datamine for prospects.

I ask for forbearance from those of you for whom all of this is painfully obvious.  It’s not obvious to everybody, and this suite of blog posts is oriented to those at the beginner/intermediate stage of social networking (remember: user groups were perfecting social networking when Twitter’s founder was still in diapers).

FileMaker(!)

It would make sense to start here, wouldn’t it?  I would humbly suggest that if you’re serious about starting a user group, it would behoove you to contact your regional BAM (Business Account Manager).  BAMs are chiefly concerned with getting FileMaker into medium to large sized corporations – that’s their job – but they have a vested interest in seeding fertile ground with the FileMaker brand.  If you don’t know who your BAM is, find out.  Call FileMaker.

FMPug

fmpug.com is the defacto clearinghouse for most FileMaker User Groups around the world.  It’s really in your best interest to contact Andy or Heather at FMPug and ask them if they know of anybody in your region who’s approached them in the past about starting a group.  There may have been earlier attempts – and the initiators of those attempts should be your first prospects.

FileMaker specific prospect resources

Next let’s talk about the large, FileMaker oriented searchable directories and forums.  You’re going to want to search for folks in your city/county, neighboring areas, and so on.

The FileMaker Consultant Search Page – These are generally people who are fulltime FileMaker developers in one sense or another – either large businesses or sole proprietors.  If anybody’s going to be interested in FileMaker, these folks are it.

FMPug Business Directory – FMPug.com has its own member directory which is worth searching.  While most members belong to local chapters, there are also “Virtual Chapter” members – people in the FMPug community who, like you, are too far from a physical group.  Check to see if there are others in your area and start networking.

FindFileMakerDevelopers.com – Like the FileMaker Consultant Search page, but with a different set of search tools and more comprehensive profile information in the listing results.  The two sites don’t overlap 100%, so don’t forget to search both.

fmforums.com – If you haven’t joined this site, you should –  even if you aren’t trying to set up a group.  This is the oldest and largest online forum dedicated to FileMaker around, and is extremely active.  Post a solicitation to the Chit Chat forum thread.

filemakertoday.com – Ditto with FileMaker today – joining both forums has immeasurable value to you as developer irrespective of whether you get this user group thing off the ground.  Same deal: post your intentions, and solicit feedback.

Other online Directories

Okay, let’s say for the sake of argument that you’ve exhausted all of the above resources.  What next?

Google, LinkedIn, Twitter and FaceBook.

Google

Hm.  Can we just assume you know how to use this?  Please?  No?  Then try Google with training wheels.

LinkedIn

If you don’t yet have a profile on LinkedIn, set one up now (mine’s here).  It’s indispensable, and an excellent calling card to boot, if you’re looking for work.  For networking /research purposes, it’s a great tool.  There are quite a few uses you can make of it to search for user group prospects:

• Keyword searches
• People searches
• Question/Answer searches
• Group affiliations (and networking through them)

I’m not going to get into all of them, but will just throw up keyword searching as an example.  Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that I’m trying to set up a group in Nebraska.

A simple keyword search for FileMaker

Searching for FileMaker…of course

yields 18000 results:

Not too shabby!

I can then filter by location – I see 1084 listings in Boston.  Well, that’s nice, but I’m all the way over here in NE. I can manually key in a search for Nebraska, and I now see:

10 is better than nothing

Lincoln, Nebraska: 10.  One of the core concepts of LinkedIn, by the way, is that you can only see the full profiles of those who are in your network (by being connected to someone who is somehow connected to you).  For me, only one of the contacts in Lincoln is connected to me.  He’s connected to me through 3 current FileMaker employees, though, so definitely someone I would want to consider contacting if I were starting a group in Nebraska.  If I were I an actual NE resident, I’d likely be connected to more than 1 of those 10.

This is where it starts to get to be about networking.  Let’s say I contact this guy, tell him of my plans, and ask for referrals to other people who might be interested.  He is much more likely than I am to know people who may be interested in what I have planned.

The interesting thing about this – and where LinkedIn really expands on the pool of prospects – is that it’s keyword searching on profiles that have FileMaker listed anywhere – it’s not just the bigwig consultants, it’s power users, business owners, IT people, data entry folks…everybody who has had a stake in FileMaker somewhere in their careers.

Next up:

Twitter

I have to admit I’m a reluctant Twitterer.  It’s not because I don’t like the medium per se – it’s more that opening TweetDeck, for someone who can’t wash dishes and hold a conversation at the same time, is a rabbit hole of “multitasking” distractions that leave a gaping half hour blank void in my workday.  I launch, do my minimum bit, and exit as gracefully as I can, before any of the glittering feeds tempt me.

That said, I highly recommend exploring Twitter simply because it’s one of those rare places where you can toss a random 140 character question like: “I’m in Bangor ME, want to start a #FileMaker user group.  Interested?”  and get answers (and a half dozen spam follow requests) in five minutes.

Do it, even if you hate it.  Just remember you can always pack Twitter away, a rarely used tool.

And, of course, if you find you don’t hate it, you may discover that there is a thriving FileMaker community on Twitter. It’s real, and it’s worth exploring in itself.

Facebook

I’m one of those who keeps my life fairly compartmentalized.  My FileMaker life lives here on phillyfilemaker, and on LinkedIn, and FaceBook is where my personal and art life is more comprehensively represented.  I’ve found that it’s really different for everyone; it may be that FaceBook is the ideal platform for you for what we’re trying to do here.  It comes down to personality type and comfort levels. Anyway, where FaceBook shines – and why it may make sense for you to exploit it for this purpose – is that it’s the epitome of social networking.  You could set up a FaceBook page for “The Bloomington/Normal FileMaker User Group”; you could join FileMaker specific groups and post questions to their walls…there are myriad possibilities here.

Okay, time for a search / social networking break.

At this point I’ll make couple of random observations:

• Continually expanding your search should be your MO; be promiscuous in your efforts.
• Look for local community gate-keepers: you want that person who can act as the hub who will lead you to other prospects.
• This whole User Group search sounds a lot like job hunting, doesn’t it?  And it smells like sales and marketing too.  That’s not a mistake.  You’re selling your idea and trying to obtain buy-in.  The only real difference here is that your currency is mindshare rather than cash.
• The corollary to the previous bullet point is that you need to learn sales skills.  Don’t worry, it won’t hurt a bit.  And picking up the confidence to build a User Group has dividends in other areas of your professional life.

That’s it for now.  I know, all you Social Networking wonks are yawning by now anyway.  This blog post was not for you

In the next installment I’ll do my best to cover the tools and services you should try to add to your toolkit to start and manage your group.  I’ll cover:

• FMPug affiliation
• Mailing List management (Mailman (FMPug uses this), FileMaker, FMSpark, MailChimp, etc)
• Event listing services
• Blogs and websites

Some of this will be my version of “best practices”, some will simply be observations about what completely failed for us

I’ll open the floor here: anyone have any other ideas they’d like to add or comment on the topic of finding group members?  Or any other thoughts?

Group Coordinators: What did you do when you started your group?  What were your learning experiences?

- Colin

 

August 24th, 6 PM, DevCon Recap, at the usual location:

IT Solutions Consulting, Inc.
414 Commerce Drive
Suite 150
Fort Washington PA 19034

We’ll be recording this one this time, not streaming it, mainly because we’ll be using Jason’s fancypants camera and mike.  If you liked the quality of the latest rash of 5 Minutes with Philly FileMaker videos, you’ll like the next meeting recording.

For DevCon folks this year – safe travels and see you next year!

- Colin

 

I will say I’ve picked up a little more information about FileMaker Go and have a better sense of how it can fit in the FileMaker ecosystem in interesting ways.  The wheels are turning.  Also enjoyed very much Michael Lee’s SQL presentations – very elegant (He’s from ProofGroup, so elegance goes without saying), and his presentation style was welcoming, lighthearted and perceptive.  Using repeating fields for cross tab reports – exploding out values using Get(CalculationRepetitionNumber) – is something I’ve had some experience with, but I’ve often had performance problems pointing those calcs against a set of related values and so on.  I have some stuff to try out at home.

This isn’t going to be a terribly informative post.  Mainly I wanted to toss up a few photos from last night’s dinner on the USS Midway.  So here they are.  Thanks to Andrew Ulane for the cockpit photo.

Hope everyone has a great final day at DevCon!

- Colin

 

I’m a firm believer that the West Coast was invented to mock East Coasters.  “See how happy you can be when you don’t need to sweat in 100 degree weather or shovel four feet of snow off your Subaru Forrester?  And oh, by the way, here we actually use our sunroofs.”  Uncomfortable pause.  “And, come on.  A Subaru Forrester?  Do you wear anoraks too?”

It wasn’t always this way with the FileMaker DevCon.  It used to be that you’d crawl out of your transportation device of choice into a humid steam bath and say to yourself, “yeah, okay, this sun thing is nice, but at least I don’t live 20 miles from downtown huddled in an air conditioning bubble”.

No longer.  FileMaker DevCon these days is now held in places that make me envious.

It’s not fair.  You know we put up with our ridiculous weather patterns for the opportunity to be smug and superior.  Thank you, DevCon, for depriving us Northeasters of one of our small pleasures in life.

We might actually get happy, for one thing.

Anyway.

Roll down a half mile to the hotel, and blam.  1200 FileMaker developers.  Mecca. Chad Sager (@simulacroton) and I…eventually…after a while…get our bags into the room, and then hit the ground running.  Hook up with Alan Deffenderfer (from Maryland) and Jason Mundok (@jmundok) after Jason’s Agile presentation, early (or is it late) dinner and some idle musing about what might be revealed… then…

KEYNOTE PRESENTATION!

I have to say, this was the most exciting keynote I’ve seen in years.  Amazing stuff.  We learned about (you didn’t seriously think I’d break non-disclosure here, did you?  I will say there were no non-disclothesure moments, thankfully.  Anyway, I like my job, so no secrets will be divulged here.  Sorry.) and that was just fantastic, hands down.

Then on to the welcome reception.  Caught up with Graham Young at Englishcomp, great guy who got me started on my first FileMaker projects back in the late 90’s.  Chatted up Andy Gaunt of FMPug.com, picked up my iPad giveaway tickets (you do know about those, don’t you?  You don’t?  Go track Andy and Heather down at their booth.  You’ll thank me, yes you will).  Somebody’s already won one.  Was it me?  Dunno, left my tickets back in the hotel rom.

Then off to bed.  No, wait.  Too tired for tweetup.  Too tired for tweetup.  Seriously, how much punishment can a man take?

Apparently there’s beer for those kinds of injuries. Hit the Tweetup, organized by Chris Kubica (@chriskubica) and chatted up my fellow tweeters!  Then bed.

Day 1 of FileMaker DevCon to come!  But first…coffee.  You’ll have to pry that Starbucks cup out of this East Coaster’s cold, dead hands.

Colin Keefe

IT Solutions Consulting, Inc
http://www.itsolutions-inc.com/

 

If you’re from eastern PA, please email me at colin.keefe@itsolutions-inc.com – we’re planning a get together for Philly FileMaker folks on Monday.  I’ll reply with the details.

Some tools to keep you connected to what’s going on:

The DevCon Scheduler (from FMPug)

http://devconscheduler.com/

This is a great planning tool that you can access on the web, on your iPhone/iPad or whatnot.  And remember that if you become a FMPug member BEFORE DevCon, you can win an iPad to view this thing on.

Twitter

If you twitter, you’ll find keeping tabs on a twitter feed during the convention is a great way to follow what presentations are worth switching to, and so on.

#FileMakerDevCon

We’re @phillyfilemaker, if you didn’t know.

See you all soon!

- Colin Keefe