geist interactive

FileMaker Go has focused a lot of attention on writing scripts that can survive disconnects without hosing your data.  Luckily this is pretty easy to do.  I need to do a really in depth article on transactions very soon, but in the meantime I thought I would throw up this cheat sheet to help people, since I keep seeing the same couple of little problems over and over again.  So here is a FileMaker Transaction Cheat Sheet.

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

I have to say I just love this thing!

FileMaker Go is much more than just a way to access FileMaker Databases on your iOS device. It represents the beginning of a whole new platform.  There is quite simply, no easier way to develop database driven iOS apps than with FileMaker.  I have to believe that the FileMaker market is going to expand quite dramatically as a result of this release.

I am kind of fond of the Quick Add feature on the Google Calendar. You just type in some thing like "Dinner, tuesday at 7p" and Google figures out how to parse that into a Calendar Event. I wanted to see if I could add something similar to the SeedCode calendar. I chose to use the ScriptMaster Plugin from 360works, because it magnifies my superpowers several times over.  That and the fact that using ScriptMaster meant I could leverage the jchronic date parsing java library .

This feature isn't completely done, but I haven't blogged since last week and I was getting twitchy, so I thought I would throw a little screen cast together, just to show what i have so far.

For most of my 15 plus years in the FileMaker development biz, the first thing I did on starting a new FileMaker solution was close the status bar and lock it. There were no script triggers or custom menus back then.  This was the safest way to get control off the solution.  

In the last few years, Custom Menus,  and Script Triggers have become well supported, solid features. This made unlocking the status bar a real possibility. With a little playing around, I found that most of the buttons in the tool bar that I wanted to trap, could be trapped.  However a couple of them proved more difficult.  Specifically, there is no straightforward way to get control of the forward and back record navigation buttons. After some tinkering, I did figure out a way to do it. What follows is the use case that drove me to find the solution, and of course, the solution.