Archive for the 'Meeting Recaps' Category

Meeting Recap: Don Levan on Exceptional Interface Design

By: Colin Keefe

Published on April 28, 2010. 0 Comments

Many thanks to Don Levan (Vanguard Custom Software) for coming out and presenting to the group!

Don presented to a packed house (28 people) on the impact of successful user interfaces, working within the constraints of human psychology and physiology – and optimizing workflows and tools for humans (as opposed to developers :) ).  Drawing liberally from Edward Tufte, Alan Cooper and Donald Norman for background material, Don laid out some excellent groundwork for building the right software tools for the job that are easy to learn and efficient to use.

This is a topic he’ll be presenting at the 2010 FileMaker DevCon (in San Diego in August),  so it was great to get a preview of the material.

Here are some photos from the meeting.  Tried out my new cell phone’s camera…it is what it is.

Published in Conferences, DevCon, DevCon, FileMaker, Meeting Recaps and Meetings by Colin Keefe. Tags: Tags: , , , , , , , .

2/23/10 Meeting recap/video stream: David Hollander

By: Colin Keefe

Published on February 24, 2010. 0 Comments

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.

Video stream recording below.

Published in FileMaker, Meeting Recaps, Meetings and Video by Colin Keefe. Tags: Tags: , , , , .

Jan 2010 Meeting recap: Pause On Error (video)

By: Colin Keefe

Published on January 27, 2010. 0 Comments

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:

Published in Conferences, FileMaker, Meeting Recaps, PauseOnError and Video by Colin Keefe. Tags: Tags: , , , .

2009 Bonanza Meeting Recap; 2010 Goals

By: Colin Keefe

Published on January 8, 2010. 0 Comments

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).

Continue reading ‘2009 Bonanza Meeting Recap; 2010 Goals’

Published in FMPug, FileMaker, Meeting Recaps, Meetings, News and Uncategorized by Colin Keefe. Tags: Tags: , , , , , , .

Philly FileMaker Blog is one year old…

By: Colin Keefe

Published on November 17, 2009. 0 Comments

On the subject of anniversaries, the one year anniversary of this blog passed quietly in early November.  Just want to take a moment to recap our experience with it so far.  Back on Nov 5th 2008, this is how we launched:

“Hello everyone.  I’m starting this blog in tandem with a push to move the Philly FileMaker Developer Group into a more participatory, public space.  Not really sure yet where that will take us.”

We’ve done our best since then to make our user group experience both public and participatory, especially in terms of sharing content with an audience that doesn’t necessarily walk through our physical doors.  In the past year we’ve:

We also had tons of DevCon speakers present to the group this year, including Matt O’Dell (FileMaker Inc), Jesse Barnum (360Works), Ernest Koe (Proof Group), Jason Mundok (IT Solutions Consulting), and Tim Neudecker (Kyologic), as well as MacWorld Expo speaker, author and Applescript guru Ben Waldie (Automated Workflows) and Anthony Celini (CAB Inc).  Thank you!

And a thank you in advance to Molly Connolly (Thorsen Consulting) and Kirk Bowman (Mighty Data), who will present in February and March 2010 respectively.

As far as the blog itself, we’re still working out which of these efforts best serve our core group and the general public, so expect things to continue to change.

But I thought I’d take this opportunity to solicit suggestions from the group and from the public as to what you’d like to see in this space.  You can email me at colin.keee(at)itsolutions-inc.com with anything you’d like to share.

It’s been an exciting year, and we’re looking forward to the next one.  For those of you in the neighborhood, hope to see you in December!

Best,

Colin Keefe
PFUG Coordinator

Published in FileMaker and Meeting Recaps by Colin Keefe. Tags: Tags: , , , , .

Meeting Recap: Matt O’Dell of FMI on Server Side Script Sequencing (Video)

By: Colin Keefe

Published on October 28, 2009. 0 Comments

Thanks to Matt for coming down from NY to present!  And to FileMaker Inc. for allowing us to present a recording of the session.

The uStream recording is here.

Matt’s presentation covered some of the advertised uses of Script Sequences – namely sequencing external batch or shell scripts with FileMaker scripts to extend the capabilities of FileMaker Server for things like imports/exports. Continue reading ‘Meeting Recap: Matt O’Dell of FMI on Server Side Script Sequencing (Video)’

Published in FileMaker, FileMaker Inc., Meeting Recaps, Meetings and Video by Colin Keefe. Tags: Tags: , , , , , , , , , .

Meeting Recap: Tim Neudecker: Supporting Users with System Design video

By: Colin Keefe

Published on September 23, 2009. 0 Comments

Tim Neudecker did a great job last night both in terms of material presentation and in shepherding the group through a roundtable discussion of system design issues, touching on:

- hardware/insfrastructure concerns
- application concerns
- data integrity

Some of the highlights included a discussion of UI metaphors: data driven US compared to task driven US, and hybrid schemes.

You will want to fast forward about 5 minutes in; the audio dropped at the beginning of the presentation.

Published in FileMaker, Meeting Recaps and Video by Colin Keefe. Tags: Tags: , , , , , .

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: , , , , , , .

Thanks to Jason Mundok; June meeting plans

By: Colin Keefe

Published on May 28, 2009. 0 Comments

Thanks to Jason Mundok for presenting Tuesday night!  He did a great job walking through real-world, production examples of dynamic reporting and script triggers in FileMaker 10 before a group of 16 souls.

We were originally planning a Design Critique for June along the lines of our Critique last fall, but I think I’m going to push that back to July.  There’s a great presenter in the pipeline that we’re trying to set up and hopefully will have with us in June – this is partly in response to those of you who asked for presentations on accounting package integration, and partly because, well, he’s a fantastic speaker.  More when I can confirm it.

Colin

Published in FileMaker and Meeting Recaps by Colin Keefe. Tags: Tags: , .

Ernest Koe of Proofgroup

By: Chad Sager

Published on March 24, 2009. 0 Comments

I just wanted to thank Ernest Koe @ernestkoe from Proofgroup ( @proofgroup ) for coming out and presenting. Colin will probably have more follow up to come.

I just wanted to let you guys know what Twitter ( wikipedia ) is, if you were wondering what he was asking about at the begining.

Published in Meeting Recaps by Chad Sager. Tags: