Update! this is full of some pretty rich language and general goofiness. If thats not for you then you probably shouldn’t watch it
This summer, I traveled back east to visit one of my customers. STAT Biomed is a medical equipment sales and service company based in Middleboro, MA. They have been using FileMaker for years, and have enjoyed great success with it. Last year they asked us to help them modify their system to help them meet the changing needs of their business. That new system has been in place for a year now and we wanted to see how things were going. Here is the story.
DevCon 2012 is over and it was quite a show! I gave two presentations, I received a Mad Dog award and both GoZync and GoDraw were featured prominently in the Keynote and the closing session.
John Sindelar from SeedCode and I were really proud that GoZync was part of the very first two demos given by FileMaker’s Andy Lecates during the Keynote. We have worked really hard on GoZync and it was really gratifying to see it up there on the big screen in front of all our colleagues. And the timing for us was perfect, as we had just announced the release of GoZync 3.0.
My first session on Re-Usable code went really well, despite the fact that I had done just about everything you are not supposed to do. The night before I had gone to bed about 1 am after practicing my slides and demos for most of the night. I was ready. My session was at 9 am so I figured I would have plenty of time for sleep. Not so.
At 1:05 am, I began to feel that I my story was incomplete. It started as just a tiny, little, small voice in the back of my head. But it gradually got louder until at 2:00 am I got up and ordered a pot of coffee. I knew what I needed to do.
I rewrote the last demo from scratch. Then I reworked the slides to fit the new demo. Normally this is a very bad idea. You never rework your preso 6 hours before lift off. Its just plain lunacy. However, I am simply un-able to deliver a presentaion that I can’t get behind in my own head. I have to feel the story from beginning to end, and all parts in between. If any of it feels weak, that doubt shows through.
I re-worke the slides until I had a narrative that I could hole heartedly commit to. I practiced the new presentation and demos until 8 am. Then I grabbed some breakfast and some more coffee, and by 8:30 I was setting up for the show. At 9 am, I lifted off. Judging from the feedback it went very well.
My second session was plauged by technical issues. I was un-able to get a decent wireless connection. This made it really hard to demonstrate the sycning tehcniqes, and app design that I wanted to. I managed to get through it, but I don’t feel I was really able to get the session back on track. I hope some people got something out of it. I am planning on re-recording the session and making it available on my site at some point soon. Hopefully that will help some folks who really wanted the info that I was un-able to show.
The biggest surprise for me was when I received and FBA award for being a Mad Dog marketer. I had no idea that was coming. I never think of myself as being a marketing person at all. But it was really nice to receive the award!
Finally in the closing session, Bill Heizer showed an application he built that made use of GoDraw, our drawing add on for FileMaker Go. It was a really nice little demo.
The rest of the week is a blur of lots of great content and conversations. The ingenuity of the community and the engineers at FMI never ceases to amaze me. I am already looking forward to Devcon 2013. Hello, San Diego 🙂
FileMaker 12 was released today. This is a big release for FileMaker. It has quite few interesting new features, and a new price for the FileMaker Go product line. FREE! Yeah thats right FREE! Read more about the release here.
I’ll have more to say on this later, but for now I just wanted to give everyone a quick heads up that GoDraw and GoSign are fully compatible with the FileMaker 12 product line. If you have existing solution using either of these products. They should convert just fine. ProSign is not yet ready for 12.
I am pleased to announce that I am speaking at the FileMaker Developer’s Conference again this year. DevCon will be held in Miami, Florida, July 16-19 2012. Click for more info about the venue and registration.
This year I am giving two presentations. One on the first day and one on the last day. Here are the abstracts and schedules for each of the sessions. Hope to see you there.
Re-Usable Code: Breaking free of Context
Tuesday, July 17th, 9:00am
Most of a FileMaker developer’s work isn’t inventing HOW to do something, it is RE-thinking how to do it in the current layout’s context. In other words, write your scripts, calcs, and other features to be context-free and you can get back to the real work of building great solutions. FileMaker code has traditionally been tightly bound to the layout and its context. Recent versions of FileMaker Pro have added several new features which make it easier to break free of context, and write your code in ways that are reusable, portable, and testable. Learn to do this and you will spend less time debugging and have more time for adding new features and a great user experience.
Design For Offline: Building FileMaker Go Apps That Work When The Internet Doesn’t
Thursday July 19th, 2:00PM
FileMaker Go embodies a unique blend of ease of use, flexibility, and power that allows it to reach places its desktop-bound predecessors never could. We have helped our clients build applications that need to work in basements, in trucks driving down rural back roads, on constructions sites, and in remote villages in Africa. These applications have to work even when the internet doesn’t. Our work with these clients taught us that the data exchange method is only one small piece of the puzzle. In this session we will review a selection of these methods and focus on the other pieces such as, workflow, schema design, and lean data sets. If you “design for offline,” whatever method you choose for exchanging data will be easier and more robust.
In our work helping our customers go mobile with FileMaker Go, we have started to develop some ideas about what it means to be mobile. I am sure these are not new ideas to many who have been developing mobile apps from the beginning, but they were new to us. I thought I would share one of the the key concepts that became obvious to us as we transitioned from desktop thinking to mobile thinking. Read more
Newbury Park, CA – Jan 29, 2012
Geist Interactive today announces the release of GoDraw 1.0, a new drawing extension for FileMaker Go. GoDraw makes it easy to integrate simple drawing features into any FileMaker Go application. You can select different pen colors and thicknesses and draw with your finger right on the layout. With GoDraw you can even draw right on top of photos. All of the drawing data is saved in the database.
Newbury Park, California – Geist Interactive is pleased to introduce GoDraw for FileMaker Go an extension that allows you to add drawing features to any FileMaker Go based application. GoDraw can be used to quickly and easily scribble notes on a canvas, mark up photos or draw on top of technical diagrams and street maps. GoDraw can draw on any photo or image.
GoDraw comes in two versions. A completely free unlocked “Lite” version and paid “full” version. The full version is also completely unlocked.
Imagine a housing inspector in the field with an iPad and a FileMaker Go application. She can take a picture of some problem with a house, perhaps some peeling paint. Then using GoDraw she can draw right on the photo, highlighting exactly where the problem is. Next, right on the iPad, she can insert the GoDraw enhanced photo in an email and send it of to her client. That spells awesome!
GoDraw represents a major breakthrough in FileMaker Go user interface technology. Geist Interactive has developed a methodology and toolchain that makes it easier to develop and deploy user interface widgets designed with HTML5 and Javascript for FileMaker Go and FileMaker Pro. GoDraw is the first add-on developed with this new technology.
All of the drawing features work even when the internet doesn’t. “We work hard to embed as much of the resources and behaviors as we possibly can right into the FileMaker database. This makes it possible for GoDraw to work even when you don’t have an internet connection,” says Todd Geist of Geist Interactive.
Feature Highlights:
System Requirements
Pricing and Availability:
GoDraw Lite is FREE and unlocked
GoDraw Full is $149 for up to 5 devices, $249 for an unlimited site license and $599 for a distribution license.
Visit the GoDraw web page for more info.
I am just wrapping up the final feature set and documention for GoDraw 1.0 for FileMaker Go. I wanted to post this little video, showing how you can use GoDraw to take a picture, draw on the Picture, save the picture to the FileMaker Database, and then attach the drawing to an email and send it. Watch the GoDraw page for more information. Here is the video:
I have been working on a Drawing App for FileMaker Go. It is coming along nicely. You are able to draw with your finger, choose different pen colors and thicknesses. You can change the background image, and the background color as well. Plus, the full version will ship with at least 5 different themes for you to choose from. Watch the GoDraw page for more information. Here is a little video showing how it works.
Read more
This started out as a fun R & D project on how to use Automator with FileMaker. It turned out pretty cool. So I decided to wrap it up into a nice demo file. You can use the code in this file to select movies, music and photos from iLife and stick them into FileMaker.