Archive for the 'Meeting Recaps' Category

Matt O’Dell on HTML5: Example Files

Published on January 26, 2012. 2 Comments

Matt O’Dell of FileMaker Inc. presented this past Tuesday at the Philly FileMaker User Group, providing an overview of HTML5 and possible applications in FileMaker Go.

We’re happy to share that Matt has graciously provided his complete demo files and presentation slide deck for download!

Included are some pretty slick iPad geolocation demos, graphical seat assignment, canvas drawing and charting, web chat, and more!  All in all fun stuff.

Thanks Matt!

Edit 1/30/2012:

While this was probably clearer during the presentation, some of the code in Matt’s DevCon 2011 offering should be credited to Todd Geist of Geist Interactive who shared his expertise with Matt for this portion of demo.  Todd has coincidentally released – today – a packaged tool for performing canvas drawing in FileMaker Go, so if any of this has whetted your appetite for this kind of thing, you’re in luck.

It’s called GoDraw.  It looks pretty slick, the lite version is free, and the full version offers editing saved drawings, Save as PDF and more.

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

4/26/11 Meeting Video: John Sindelar and Jesse Barnum – Zulu iCal Server and Docubin

Published on May 12, 2011. 0 Comments

Thanks to Andy at fmpug.com for hosting this stream!

This was a great meeting – and at 2 hours and change, packed with stuff. Enjoy.

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

Separation Model Smackdown Video Recording

Published on January 31, 2011. 5 Comments

Here’s the complete video feed of last Tuesday’s meeting. Thanks to Kevin Ayers for presenting, for the equipment, AND for post-processing of the video! This goes a long way toward what we’d like to shoot for in future recordings.

Give it some time to load, it’s over an hour in length.

All in all, a lively discussion!

February’s meeting ought to be a recap of PauseOnError, since a few of us are heading up there, and ought to have some interesting field reports to share.

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

Year End Meeting Recap

Published on December 10, 2010. 0 Comments

I’m going to let a first time attendee, Patricia Kirby Gibler (of enable businesses), give her thoughts on last Tuesday’s meeting – which she’s kindly letting me reprint from an email she sent us the day after the meeting.  They’re not just kind words – they’re an eloquent description of the power of FileMaker to empower users.  “Turning data into relationships” indeed.

It also reinforces my belief in the power of face-to-face interaction.  User groups have been around for decades upon decades now, and they might feel a little old-school to some  (maybe a little rebranding is in order: PhillyFilemakerMeetup?), but IMO there’s still no substitute for people talking together in the same room.

Italics below are mine. Continue reading ‘Year End Meeting Recap’

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

Meeting Un-recap – FileMaker Go; next up: Amazon Web Services

Published on September 30, 2010. 0 Comments

Thanks everyone for coming out Tuesday!  We had 26 folks here to listen to Matt O’Dell discuss FileMaker Go for the iPad.

I’m going to save a real recap for next week.

In the meantime, I’ll just put the word out that our next meeting is going to feature Alan Deffenderfer, who’s been doing some amazing stuff integrating Amazon Web Services with a FileMaker Bookseller’s management product.  More on that to come.

- Colin

 
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Meeting Recap: Don Levan on Exceptional Interface Design

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

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)

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

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

Philly FileMaker Blog is one year old…

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

 
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