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Database Solutions & Consultancy
An occasional blog mostly related to how technology, databases and FileMaker in particular can be of value to businesses, but with the odd random post thrown in every now and then.
As technology continues to evolve, businesses are looking for ways to improve their operations and stay competitive. One solution that we have been championing for over 25 years is the use of custom apps. A custom app is a software application that is tailored to the specific needs of a business. In this post, we will explore some the reasons you might choose a custom app for your businesses.
FileMaker is very flexible. As developers we are given options as to how to reference things; fields, scripts and layouts can be referenced by name or number/id. Whilst we know that referencing things by name is more fragile, it is still a very useful capability to have, but it is definitely more robust to reference by ID…
The release of a new version of FileMaker is always an opportunity to review current development practices and the announcement of FileMaker 16 was no different. The news that FileMaker now uses a Single Document Interface (SDI) under Microsoft Window is very significant and will have a big influence on our development practises for deployment on Windows. I must admit to being distracted by the second change to FileMaker windows - the introduction of Card Windows - as the introduction of SDI has another consequence…
A few years ago (2013) I contributed a module to www.modularfilemaker.org to add Browser like back and forward navigation to FileMaker solutions. Today a new version has been released for FileMaker 16 which incorporates the following changes…
Now that we have been working with FileMaker 16 for a while, I would like to reflect on some new features that I believe will have a huge impact on future development practices.
The first is the new Card Window style…
A few weeks ago I wrote about how I moved this web site from a proprietary content management system to one where the data is managed from a FileMaker database. In this post am discussing how data is cached to ensure the site is always fast and that the load on the server is kept to a minimum (very very important for high traffic sites).
The recent blog post from Tim Dietrich got me thinking. I have long admired people who are able to radically declutter and maintain a minimalist lifestyle and if I'm honest, I've been a little jealous as well. For as long as I can remember, I have aspired to be super organised, but never quite managed to reach my target. Despite periodic decluttering, I always seem to end up accumulating more stuff than we have space to store!
Finally it's done! The blog on the new APJ web site (the one you are reading now) is now pulling content from a FileMaker database. It really is made very easy with FMWebFrame. I'm really excited about the possibilities this opens up for FileMaker web publishing…
I must say a huge Thank You to Tim Dietrich for creating such an awesome add-on to the FileMaker API.
I have been wanting the APJ Ltd web site to be responsive for a couple of years now, but never got round to it. It's not quite finished, but good enough to go public. I used Reflector to grab an image of the site on my iPhone. It's a shame reflector is so honest as it reveals how I'm getting my money's worth from my 4S!.
I was fortunate enough to be interviewed by Tim Dietrich for the FileMaker Addict web site after my involvement with beta testing FMEasySync - the open source sync framework for the FileMaker platform. Not much more to say really, except to thank Tim for the opportunity…
I stood up this morning in a networking meeting (wearing my bow tie of course) and said 'at APJ we have a time machine' and although we don't own a Tardis, the effect is the the same; we can indeed manipulate time.
Everyone uses a web browser these days and is familiar with the concept of back and forward buttons. I needed a fast way to add this type of navigation to existing database solutions irrespective of the existing methods of navigation without breaking any existing functionality.
The release of a new version of FileMaker is always an opportunity to review current development practices and the announcement of FileMaker 12 is no different. The news that FileMaker Go is now free and the new css theme based user interface will certainly have an impact on our development practices.
This post, however, was prompted by something that has not changed in FileMaker 12....
Tablets are everywhere. Mobile computing seems to be here to stay. As a FileMaker developer I am very excited by the opportunities and challenges this presents. Building for mobile devices is different to building for the desktop where connectivity is generally reliable and predictable. When dependant on the mobile phone network or even wireless access points, you never know when moving a metre will result in losing the connection…
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