Learning Claris FileMaker

Knowing when to rebuild or remodel a database is key to maximizing your satisfaction with both the interim and the final results.

If you’ve ever been tasked with reskinning a FileMaker solution with a new color scheme, you know that what seems like it should be a reasonably easy job can quickly turn into a painstaking ordeal to track down every occurrence of every variant of every color in every style element.

This was exactly the problem that led the developers at Skeleton Key to create SimpleKolorswap.

Now you can easily take stock of every color reference in your custom theme, make changes to those colors, and save your changes as a new custom theme to be assigned to your layouts in a few simple steps.

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There are some common kinds of business applications that almost everyone uses: Invoicing and billing software of some sort, customer databases/CRMs, project management software, just to name a few.

But what’s an organization to do if they have needs that go beyond these “typical” applications?

The truth is that just about every business has some unique workflows that make it different from all the other businesses out there.

Those are often best addressed by creating custom business applicationsuniquely tailored to the business’ requirements.

Over the years, we’ve created a wide range of these custom business applications for clients using the Claris FileMaker platform.

We’ve found that it’s perfect for businesses that occupy an unusual niche or that have very specific needs.

And by using Claris FileMaker, we often can develop those applications in less time, and at a lower cost, than other development firms out there.

Here, then, are some great examples of our doing just that: ...

The Data Viewer in FileMaker Pro 16 Advanced got some much needed attention with this release which can best be described as FAST! 

Its improved interface will have you working, testing and troubleshooting faster and easier thanks to the Auto-Complete, Search and Automatically Evaluate tools.

With the release of FileMaker Pro 16 a great new feature has been introduced for those of us who use the Windows operating system.

The FileMaker Pro 16 Windows interface has been redesigned to work more like the Mac OS version by now allowing multiple and separate windows!

No longer will Windows users be limited to keeping all their layout windows within the FileMaker Pro application window.

The FileMaker 16 Card Window is a new user interface tool which will not only make your application look better, it will help you reuse your layouts.

Using the Card Window Style you will be able to display unrelated record data, related record data, and transform the look of currently viewed records.

At the same time, it just might make window management easier.

FileMaker is a very responsive application – you ask it to do something and it responds pretty quickly.

But sometimes, we want FileMaker to be more patient and wait until we’re done before it does something.

In effect, we want FileMaker to practice a bit of patience. We’re going to talk about pickers today, and […]

That’s what a picker lets you do. It gives you a simple interface – usually, a search field is used to filter the list, so you can narrow a list of 500 types of [whatever you’re looking for] down to just a few possibilities. This can make it much easier for a user to select the correct data to put into the field, especially when the list of possible choices is large or will grow over time.

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Strangely enough, every few years some well-meaning IT professional asks us this question, and to be completely honest, we can understand why.

Eons ago, in the early days of the FileMaker product, this comparison made sense, as both FileMaker and Access let a user author databases that were self-contained and for individual users.

Since then, a lot has changed.

The short answer to the title question is: NO.

A slightly longer answer would be something like this: ... read more on the blog !

Are you using FileMaker Go to build mobile solutions?

Would you like those solutions to look and feel more like other mobile apps?

FileMaker 16 comes with some new layout transition animations that will make your FileMaker Go solutions look, feel and behave much more like mobile users have come to expect.

While we have been able to use plugins and the Insert from URL script step to consume data from other web-based systems using either SOAP or REST services, FileMaker did not have a native way to easily serve its data to other sites. 

There is custom web publishing, and ODBC connections, but that was still somewhat limiting when it came to serving data to other web-based systems from anywhere in the world.

That all changes in FileMaker 16 with the introduction of the REST based Data API. 

Now your FileMaker solution can behave like any number of other databases from around the globe who have distinct APIs written for external users to consume the data.

The FileMaker 16 Platform has launched and it’s packed with great new features for both developers and users.

We’re excited about significant new features such as server-side PDF creation, card windows, the new Windows UI, enhanced data viewer, and native JSON functions.

The platform also introduces several innovative features such as the FileMaker Data API, external script steps, OAuth 2 support, and region monitoring.

The new FileMaker 16 Platform is stronger than ever and we can’t wait to start building with this great new feature set.

Our team has written a series of blog posts to introduce some of our favorite new features.