Tag Archive for 'UI'

Please Join us September 27th: Kyo Logic Presents: Barcode Readers in FileMaker using Script Triggers; What does that affordance tell you to do?

Greetings FileMaker Enthusiasts,

Our next Philadelphia FileMaker Developer Group meeting has been scheduled for Tuesday evening, September 27th 2011 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

Please RSVP here if you are planning to attend this meeting:
http://www.fmpug.com/rsvp.php?eventID=1221

Kyo Logic Presents: Barcode Readers in FileMaker using Script Triggers; What does that affordance tell you to do?

John Mathewson and Tim Neudecker from Kyo Logic LLC will showcase two short presentations to the group!

Part 1: Implementing a Barcode Reader in FileMaker using script triggers and no input fields
John Mathewson

Recently Kyo Logic developed a barcode reader that works on any layout in the application and captures input using script triggers. To optimize performance and respect the user’s current operating environment, this work required careful planning and testing. John Mathewson will review using script triggers for this purpose and will demonstrate how the code was developed and tested.

Part 2: What does that Affordance tell you to do?
Tim Neudecker

The concept of affordance in a user interface is critical to a user’s understanding of how a system works. We will review several examples, both good and bad, of affordances. Visual perception of controls in your software is very important. Developers must avoid false affordances that mislead or confuse users. The first half of this presentation will be a review of real word affordances and examples of improvements to improve user interface controls. The second half of the discussion will be a review of members user interfaces and open discussion about how to improve the controls. Please bring screen shots or sample files on thumb drives you would like to review and improve and the collective mind of the group will help you make your users happier.

About the Presenters

John Mathewson is President and co-founder of Kyo Logic, LLC. He is a growth management and organizational design expert. While President and CEO of AGA, a New York advertising agency, the company reached the final rounds of the Malcolm Baldrige National Performance Excellence Awards. He has spoken frequently at industry conferences on such topics as Implementing High Performance Organizations. He is a Board member of The Connecticut Audio Society and is a former Adjunct Assistant Professor of Information Analysis at New York University. He has been developing database applications using Visual FoxPro, SQL and FileMaker Pro since 1986. He is a certified FileMaker 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11 developer.

Tim Neudecker is the co-founder of Kyo Logic. Tim is a leading software engineer who has worked for large companies such as Federated Department Stores and AGA to small offices such as The Mertz Gilmore Foundation and Chess in the Schools. At AGA, Tim led the design team that developed high-speed workflow and digital asset software, an advanced human resources intranet and a customer extranet that greatly enhanced customer access to the creative process. These and other innovations helped bring the agency to the top of its industry segment.

Tim attended the University of Arkansas School of Engineering and is a published author on topics from network engineering to database design. He is the founder and president of the New York FileMaker Developers’ Group where he leads fellow developers in continuing education around database development.

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

 

Meeting Recap: Don Levan on Exceptional Interface Design

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.

 

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

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.

 

Themed Color Palettes for Mac

Earlier this year I mentioned a method for sharing color palettes on a Mac, useful if you have multiple developers working on a project and you need to keep everyone on the same color scheme.

Recently on Twitter someone posted a link to Mondrianum (FREE from Lithoglyph).  I’m not a habitual downloader of the latest/greatest, but this was such a simple, elegant and useful tool that I thought I’d share – I think this thing is great.

Essentially it pulls content from the Adobe Kuler online community into the Mac system-wide color picker, making the color themes available in ANY Mac app that uses the system color picker (Which FileMaker does).

Once you’ve installed it, you can select any color theme and either view it online, or add it as a new Apple Color List.

If you add it as a color list, then you’ll have a new Color List in your dropdown menu in your Palette tab, and can start playing around.  Download it now, and have fun!

 

Tips and Tricks: Arbitrarily Navigating an Array of Fields in FMP 10

To follow up with the presentation from Tuesday night, here is the first of half a dozen or so posts going into more detail on my demo files.

First up, navigating an array of fields in an arbitrary order (as opposed to tab order).

First, a little setup. To make this work you need to give layout object names to all the fields in the array. I just chose array01, array02, etc. so we can do some simple math to find out which object to go to.

Be sure and name and or number all your layout objects.

Be sure and name and or number all your layout objects.

When Filemaker allows us to go to field by name, this solution will be a little more elegant, for now you just need to name the layout objects and your field names can be arbitrary.

More after the jump:

Continue reading ‘Tips and Tricks: Arbitrarily Navigating an Array of Fields in FMP 10′