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.

 

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

 

Our next Philadelphia FileMaker Developer Group meeting has been scheduled for Tuesday evening, December 7th 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://tinyurl.com/37mhhh

This is our Sixth Annual Year End Bonanza!

Please RSVP here if you are planning to attend this meeting:
http://www.fmpug.com/rsvp.php?eventID=1108

THE TOPICS:

We’ll be continuing our tradition of reviewing the 2010 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.

THE FOOD:

Catered food will provided, courtesy of IT Solutions, Inc.

THE RAFFLE PRIZES:

We’re going pretty light this year on vendor-provided raffle items, but we do have many books to give away courtesy of PeachPit Press, and several PhillyFileMaker branded coffee mugs.

A YEAR-END NOTE ABOUT THE GROUP:

I’m happy to say that we’ve continued our year-on-year growth in meeting attendance – in 2009 we averaged 19.3 attendees, for 2010 it looks like we’ll average 24. Average 1st time attendees at meetings is up too – 2009 it was 3.5; 2010 it’s 4.1.

This was an exciting year for FileMaker, with the release of FileMaker 11 and especially the release of FileMaker Go, which I think contributed to the healthy numbers we’ve been seeing in group attendance.

During the meeting I’m going to take a little time to ask the members what they might like to see in the coming year – what speakers would you love us to snag? What topics do you want covered? Any changeups in how we run things? So if you’d like a voice in this, please do come.

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

 

This presentation will provide a brief overview of Amazon Web Services and then focus on performing a REST request to return product data from the Amazon product advertising API.  Amazon API credentials, requirements and limitations will be discussed as well several strategies for performing a REST request from FileMaker that is AWS compatible.  A use case that employs SmartPill PHP and XML/XSLT will be presented as one way harness and deploy Amazon Web Services in the real world.

About the Speaker

Alan Deffenderfer is CEO of ABD Enterprises, Inc. and has been developing with FileMaker since 2004.  He has been a college professor for the last 14 years and has worked in the book industry since 1993.  He currently uses FileMaker to run his own online book business.

Jason interviewed Alan before the 2009 DevCon recap; you can see the interview here.

Door Prize

We’ll also be giving away a door prize, courtesy of our User Group membership with PeachPit Press.  Assuming we can obtain interesting stuff from PeachPit going forward, this may become a regular thing.

Undercover User Experience Design

Undercover User Experience is a great little primer on UX work, written by Cennydd Bowles and James Box.

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.

You can read our blog to get updates and meeting recaps.  Twitter here.  Facebook over there.

We’re also an FMPug Chapter.    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 IT Solutions in our new Blog and Videos section of our website!

- Follow ITS on LinkedIn and learn more about the company:

 

As with so many things here at Philly FileMaker, it’s an experiment.  If it floats, we’ll keep it, if it sinks…you must promise never to speak of it again.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Philly-FileMaker-User-Group/126085994109837

- Colin

 

I started thinking about this series of posts (yep, this is #1 in a series) after a few conversations I had with people at this year’s FileMaker DevCon.  I’d strike up a conversation with someone at lunch or at the bar, we’d exchange stories and experiences…and inevitably the talk would shift to why people come to DevCon in the first place.

Reason number 1: for the community.  Hands down.  The clear pleasures and advantages of meeting other people who are engaged in the same practice as you – with whom you can share ideas, learn from and teach –  always trump session topics, what’s on the lunch menu, what kind of swag you can haul back, or how many banners you can affix to the bottom of your convention badge.  One of the things that’s sometimes lost when you do a hand count of how many people in the room have iPads is how many people in the room are there because of the other people.

I’m going to go on a tangent here for a moment to talk about human behavior, and will come back to those DevCon conversations a little later.

We’re advocates of Agile development methodologies here at IT Solutions.  One of the core statements of the Agile manifesto is: where possible, value individuals and interactions over processes and tools.  In the context of Agile development, that statement helps emphasize (and leverage) the fact that software is built by humans working together.

I happen to love that statement, though, because I believe it’s not just a statement about development workflow.

It’s an observation about what really motivates us as humans.  Our monkey brains are social.  Our emotional and social batteries are recharged by engaging with each other.  Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, IM, blogs, websites, email, Basecamp, and everything else that we use as proxies for social interaction offers us myriad opportunities to recharge those batteries, at recharge rates proportional to bandwidth.

By far, though, the highest, most optimized bandwidth available to us is face to face, in person contact.  You can live stream and tweet all you like, but I can guarantee I can communicate more in five minutes with you in person than I ever could online.

This is why DevCon matters.  We all know it; it’s why we go.  To be with our particular sub-tribe of humans, speaking our own language.

This is also…

Why User Groups Matter

All right, so maybe I’m biased, because I run a user group.  Feel free to bump the font size down a few notches in your mind.  I will say that more often than not, the conversations I had at DevCon would eventually shift to what kind of local resources were available for whoever I was speaking with.  Who was in their area?  Who could they network with?

And especially…was there a FileMaker Developer Group nearby?

At this point the conversation went one of three ways:

• There was one, and it was awesome
• There was one, kinda, but it was an hour away
• The nearest one was in the next state or country

With the second and third responses, the tone was either wistful or frustrated.  I’ve had a bunch of conversations like this in the past, and my reply has always been: “Start your own!  It’s easy!”

Which probably glosses over things pretty badly.  For one thing, starting anything is never easy.

There’s the risk involved with investing time and energy into something that has a good chance of never getting off the ground.

There’s the open question of whether or not anybody will be actually interested enough to come.

There’s the “qualifications” question that some people ask: “Why me?  Who’s going to come to a group that I start?  What, am I special or something?”

No, you’re not special.  But you can start a User Group anyway.

This post is an introduction to a series of posts I’m going to put out in the next few weeks providing some key concepts and advice on how to start a group and how to grow it.  I’ll be covering:

• Initial tools and frameworks for managing a group
• Finding group members, marketing the group and building a community
• Finding speakers and topics

I’ll get into FileMaker-specific concepts in places, but by and large this stuff applies to anyone looking to start a technical user group.

That’s to come.  For now, if you’re really interested in starting a FileMaker User/Developer Group in your area – or finding one – your first stop should be to www.fmpug.com.  I’ll be talking about FMPug as a marketing and organizational tool in a future post, so won’t go into detail here.  Just take a quick look now.

What qualifies me to give advice?

I’m not special either  But I have had some experience building communities.  We’ve done a lot of hard work over the years to build Philly FileMaker into a large, robust group, and have learned some lessons along the way about what works and what doesn’t.  We want to share that.  And when I take off my day job hat, I run an art gallery with my wife, Mount Airy Contemporary, which has been a community-building exercise in a very similar way.  And when I take off my gallerist hat, I’m an artist, and engaged with promotion and community-building around that as well.  And when all of those hats are safely stowed, and I’m back at work, I promote training opportunities for IT Solutions, as well as work as a full time FileMaker Consultant.

This stuff matters to me, in short.  And I want to talk about it.  I want to see the FileMaker community expanded and enriched through local efforts.  I want more of you folks out there starting groups today. This’ll be my little contribution to that effort.  Feel free to comment along the way.  If you’re a group coordinator, especially, and have your own advice to add, it would be most welcome.

Colin

Coordinator
Philadelphia FileMaker User Group

www.philllyfilemaker.org

 

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.

 

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.

 

January 26th Meeting:
- Extended Stump the Chump: Bring in your code for troubleshooting!
- Pause On Error UnConference in Portland: Jason Mundok’s first hand report

- About the Philadelphia FileMaker User Group

Details:

Greetings FileMaker Enthusiasts,

Our next Philadelphia FileMaker User Group meeting has been scheduled for Tuesday evening, January 26 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://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=961

Extended Stump the Chump / Roundtable

Going forward, “Stump the Chump” is the kickoff segment of every meeting! If you have a problem you’d like to discuss with the group, or want to get feedback on alternative ways to code a particular bit of programming, please bring your laptop or flash drive loaded with the files.

One other change: going forward, we are ALL chumps. It was pretty much that way anyway, since thankfully folks are not shy to put their two cents in, but we might as well make it official and get rid of the “designated chumps” idea. So this is really an opportunity for free-ranging roundtable discussion of code.

Since we have a pretty open schedule this meeting, MORE IS BETTER. If you don’t have specific code to discuss, bring in talking points or a topic to bounce around.

PauseOnError UnConference: Jason Mundok’s first hand report

PauseOnError is an UnConference whose content and organization is entirely participant driven. The first POE UnConference was held last summer in Manhattan; we reported on it here:

http://www.phillyfilemaker.org/?p=492

The second one is happening in Portland OR next week – over 100 top-tier developers are converging to discuss just about everything you could imagine, and our own Jason Mundok will be there. He’ll be doing some of his “5 Minutes with Philly FileMaker” interviews, and will give us a report of his experiences.

Pause On Error: http://www.pauseonerror.com/
Topic Schedule: http://pauseonerror.pbworks.com/PDX10Schedule

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