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!

Two sets of summary data, One report

By Jerry Salem

I was working on a project for a client recently.  They were replacing an old system with a new one built using Filemaker 9.   The system is a standard client, invoice database.  One of the reports requested was a summary of sales.  The report presents sales summarized by product type, in addition sales sumarized by product location.  It was presented as a nice one page summary to ‘the boss’ weekly.

FM Solutions – The IT Solutions FileMaker Newsletter

IT Solutions Consulting is pleased to announce its first issue of FM Solutions, a quarterly newsletter focused solely on FileMaker!  We launched this back in April; the next issue will be out in June.

FMSolutions April 2009 Newsletter

Our goal is to provide you with relevant news, tips, and ideas about innovative ways to use the FileMaker line of products and other related technologies to help you and your business run better and more efficiently. This first issue highlights a few of the great new user features in FileMaker Pro 10, tips on how to search for date ranges faster, and an innovative way that we integrated a FileMaker solution with an existing file server.

If you like what you see and would like to subscribe, email Jim Higgins: jim.higgins@itsolutions-inc.com.

Tips and Tricks: Open a FileMaker database using a Hyperlink

(Editor’s Note: As some of you know I’ve been asking my colleagues to write tips and tricks content for the blog.  At some point in the future we may be asking the group community at large for contributor content as well.   Jerry is a 9 Certified FileMaker Developer at ITS; he also runs the 101 and Intermediate trainings here.  Thanks, Jerry!

– Colin).

One thing that really gets my goat is multiple security gates.  If I have already logged into my computer using a login and pw, why do I still have to use another login and password to further authenticate myself when I open my database?  Worse yet, sometimes an end user will put in an account/password to get into the computer, then the SAME account/password info to log into the database.

There are a couple of ways around this.  Most programmers will tell you, “Use Single Sign On authentication.”  FileMaker developers will typically say, “Use an opener file and save the login and PW there.”

Both of these are fine if the situation merits or permits it.  Here I present another option.  In this case, the end users are not using active directory to manage Accounts.  They also don’t want to use an opener file, for a number of reasons that are outside the scope of this document. 

LAST CHANCE: “Power of 10″ Road Show April 1 at the Philadelphia Marriott

 

Just a reminder that FileMaker Inc. is hosting The Power of 10 Tour, coming to Philadelphia on April 1st, at the Philadelphia Marriott and Courtyard from 8:30 am to noon.  IT Solutions will be co-presenting at this event.  That’s THIS Wednesday.

Space is very limited, so register now at http://www.filemaker.com/roadshow/ to hold your seat.

This exclusive inside look will show you how to get the most out of the new features in the FileMaker 10 product line.  Together with your regional FileMaker representatives and certified FileMaker developers from IT Solutions, you’ll:

-          Tour the new features in the product line

-          Do “deep dives” to get a thorough understanding of the features

-          Learn what resources are available to keep you up-to-date

As a side note, if you’re attending this event, have never come to a Philly FileMaker User Group meeting, and want to learn more, feel free to track me down to talk about it…or anything else on your mind.

Colin Keefe

 

 

Tips and Tricks: Sharing Color Palettes in a multiple developer environment

Chad showed this one to me, but since it came up in a conversation with some other colleagues yesterday I thought I’d share it on his behalf.

It’s often the case that when designing a solution, you and the client agree on a color palette as part of the overall look and feel of the product.  However, when several developers are working on the same project, one needs a way to share those colors across the team.

On the Mac, one way to do this is by defining a new Color Palette, and share the Color Palette file with the other team members.  Since this trick uses the OS Color Palette tool, it’s Mac only.

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.

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:

Tips and Tricks: Self Tooltipping Fields in Filemaker 10

(Editor’s Note:  Here’s the first post from Chad.  I’m monkeying with how to display author names in WordPress, but until then, you’ll have to live with a stupid Editor’s Note.)

 

Anyone with the dream of being able to show field comments as the tooltip, there finally is an answer.

In previous versions of Filemaker it was possible to grab the field comments on a layout for a tooltip, but only by hard-coding the name of the field in the tooltip.  This makes managing the tooltip a little cumbersome, you’d have to touch every field and give it an unique tooltip if so inclined.  In that case you might as well manage the text of the tooltip on the layout object. 

You’d need to put:

FieldComment ( Get ( FileName ) ; "Ship_Date" )

A couple of new functions now make this a lot easier, potentially inserting a single tooltip into all fields on all the layouts across your system, and then editing them in a centralized location.  The first is the Self function, introduced in Filemaker 9, and now the GetFieldName () function.

When editing a field definition, you can add comments to the field like so:

 

Then, in layout mode you can select one or more fields and enter this as a tooltip:

 

FieldComment ( Get ( FileName ) ; GetFieldName ( Self  ) )

And now when you mouse over the comments appear.

New Authors…

Just a quick introductory post:

You’re going to see new authors crop up here from time to time, to post tips and tricks, thoughts on FileMaker, or ruminations on the state of software generally.  This is part of my push to expand the usefulness of the User Group beyond the the actual face-to-face meetings themselves.  We’ll be rolling in new contributors slowly, so you don’t need to pop in here every day – but know that going forward, not every post here will be a meeting announcement.

With that preamble over, I’d like to introduce Chad Sager.

Chad’s a lead FileMaker developer here at IT Solutions Consulting who’s been at the forefront in our office in terms of exploring the new possibilities that FileMaker 10 features offer us – new coding practices, old coding practices that can be retired, tricks and cool stuff generally.

He’s the second act at tomorrow’s meeting too, following up after Matt O’Dell.