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Hacking Your Own FileMaker Platform Solutions
Should FileMaker Platform developers mount hacking attacks on their own solutions? At first glance, this may seem an odd question. But I believe that the answer is “Yes, we should.”
Consider this. As developers we see our solutions from a totally different perspective than Threat Agents see them. Without practicing our own hacking skills, we can become blind to the vulnerabilities a Threat Agent can exploit to compromise the Confidentiality
[ Edit: 3/16/2016 - With the help of some other people, we have been able to recover, or recreate some of the original images from original thread. ]
Security is always a big topic when it involves data, or people, or possessions. Recently, over on the FileMaker Community, there was a very beneficial discussion regarding security. Unfortunately, that discussion was the victim of a necessary action...and was deleted. It was deleted, because the discussion was tied to a video that, as was det
This is the first example I was showing in my session Marvelous Optimizations at Pause On Error [x] London 2011. I already wrote about this optimization some time ago. It’s the one that led me to unveil the Marvelous Optimization Formula. You can find the original article here: FileMaker Script Execution Time Cut From 5 Hours To 6 Seconds
I simply took the example and added FM Bench Detective into it to be able to exactly measure and examine what happens in the slow and the optimized script
March 9, 2010 is a date I recall quite clearly: not only was it the release date for FileMaker 11; it was also the day a bunch of my FileMaker SQL code broke, due to changes in the FM 11 internal SQL parser. If you’re new to this subject, or perhaps a bit rusty, I [...]
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A lot of folks have been asking for the Virtual List example file we put together with Bruce Robertson, so here it is: VirtualList.zip
This Virtual List technique is part of what make our Calendar fast, and allows FMSearchResults to show records from different tables in the same ‘portal’. We demonstrated some applications of this at DevCon’s Year in Review in 2010 and 2011, showing how this can really speed up FileMaker displays, especially those formatted as columns, grids, or lists.
Tod
We have a small subset of customers who wire their calendars up to act as dashboards on big displays. I’ve always thought this was cool and someday hope to get around to making one for SeedCode, a la the great dashboard at Panic.
One of these customers asked for something pretty cool today: they wanted to be able to cycle through the different resources on the calendar (recording studios in her system), showing each one on the week view for a few seconds, before moving to the next studio autom
FileMaker Number Functions Video Series
Last week we featured a series of five (5) videos from our Certified FileMaker Developer, Chad Adams, on our Facebook and Twitter social media profiles. He created these videos to both compliment a series of Text Function videos he did earlier this year, and to offer as a supplemental resource for other developers and/or novice FileMaker users.
Chad chose to cover these particular Number Functions because they are ones that he uses most often, and t
A Different Perspective On Recently Released
FileMaker, Inc. How To Paper
Regarding External Authentication Configuration
By
Wim Decorte
and
Steven H. Blackwell
I am pleased to have as co-author of this BLOG posting the renown and exceptionally highly regarded “developer’s developer” Wim Decorte.
FileMaker, Inc. recently published a FileMaker How To article entitled Replicating an External Authentication Environment for Develop
Sometimes the hard stuff turns out to be really easy.
It always impresses me that Jason has a way of finding the simplest ways of doing things. For example, when iCal treats a holiday as an all day event, SeedCode can pick that up as a two-day event. A customer asked about how to work around this, changing the iCal parser in SeedCode Calendar Pro.
Jason sent them this screen shot showing how you can more easily teach SeedCode to ignore the end date of the holiday calendar, after the iCal eve
West Coast FMPug Tour Guest Speaker Jason Thomas on Sales
This week, the Skeleton Key office will sacrifice the physical presence of our beloved head of sales – Jason Thomas – as he travels to the West Coast to speak to enthusiastic
Jason’s topic is Sales. His goal is to expand awareness of the need for a sales process while leveraging the expertise that already resides within both the in-house developer and consultant communities. He hopes to provide new knowledge, and improve attendees
Have you ever wished there were an easy way to summarize the contents of one portal in another portal? Perhaps something along the lines of the “Summary” portal below? I’ve touched on the possibility of using a portal to produce (or assist in the production of) an on-screen summary report a couple times in the [...]
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This weekend, Todd Geist and I took the train up from LA for a 33 hour code sprint and built the start of Worx, the next file for GoZync.
This is a great way to work and we got a ton done.
Todd on the Coast Starlight
Worx is a work orders system for iPad: users in the office assign orders to technicians and those techs “zync” the orders down to their iPads before completing the orders. Orders come down with contact info, maps, and a serious items database capable of browsing and selecti
This is a fresh story of me spending hours trying to fix a technical issue and accidentally revealing a gold nugget. A few days ago one of my nightly server-side scripts stopped working without any apparent reason. But when I tried to run the script in FileMaker Pro it worked just fine. I really needed a way to debug the script on the server.
Read more here
Skeleton Key - The Positive Effect
Marketing – be it 'traditional', word-of-mouth, grassroots or social media based, is not new for me.
Marketing for Skeleton Key, a service-driven, Custom Application Development/Information Technology Consulting company is relatively new for me.
My adventure began in mid-January...
In order to promote and solidify the Skeleton Key (SK) brand to the widest-reaching audience and business consumers of FileMaker software, I had to learn to understand wha
Broadly speaking, FileMaker developers fall into three categories: a) those who do all their development on local files; those who do all their development on hosted files; and c) those who sometimes develop locally, and sometimes in a hosted environment. I happen to fall into category “c”, and suspect that most of my colleagues [...]
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Kiosk mode is a cool way to run a FileMaker database in a full screen environment where users are prevented from accessing the other functionality of the operating system. But what if you have a normal FileMaker solution and wish to use kiosk functionality in certain areas only?
In this article we illustrate how a typical FileMaker solution can be enhanced with a kiosk component for carrying out certain actions. We use the article example file to help illustrate this. We also give some inf
Ever since I posted part 2 of this series, I’ve been torn between, on the one hand, wanting to move on to other topics; and on the other, the realization that I wasn’t quite done with this one yet. So, here is what I expect will be my final posting, and final demo (dynamic list [...]
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How To Article Featured in October Newsletter for FileMaker TechNet
Mark Richman, President of Skeleton Key, was both flattered and happy to contribute his FileMaker “How To” article, Replicating an External Authentication Environment for Development, in the October, 2011 issue of the FileMaker Technical Network e-Newsletter that circulated today.
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I noticed that one of the articles updated in the official FileMaker Knowledge Base on September 23, 2011 was explaining how to select a random set of records in a FileMaker database. I was wondering how fast the currently recommended technique is and whether Ican make it faster with the help of FM Bench. I tried to apply it to a set of 50,000 records of randomly generated data. Then I made it much faster…
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Aggressive Hiring Initiative Successful for Continued Growth
Skeleton Key has made significant progress in meeting its hiring goals in Q3 with the addition of Technology Consulting division and Application Development division. <p><a href="http://www.skeletonkey.com/images/Blog/EricChris_polaroid_2011-09-22.jpg">
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Well, I thought I’d said everything I had to say on this subject, but yesterday afternoon I noticed a glaring omission in part 1′s demo — what happens if the user manually unsorts the found set? The sort indicator doesn’t disappear the way a good little sort indicator should. Fortunately this is easily remedied, thanks [...]
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GoZync can be a little tricky to add to your file, this is why many people build out from our example FMGo file, and why we offer implementation packages to do it for you. Once it’s in, however, GoZync is quite easy to extend. It is a framework, after all, and we built it to be extensible.
We anticipated that you’d add fields to mobile solutions you already deployed–thus GoZync can deliver new builds to your users–and we made it easy to add fields to mappings you’ve already established. This v
Earlier this year, I posted a three-part series on Portal Sorting, and part 2 focused on dynamically sorting a portal when a column heading was clicked. Well, with just a few tweaks, this technique can be applied to dynamic sorting of found sets, and of course the most likely place to employ something like this [...]
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Very proud of the crew in the UK for pulling this off. Sessions look great; really wish I could get there.
Ian’s stuff on SQL in particular is very much in line with what we’re working on these days. SQL + Virtual List = Happy. Other’s I’m looking forward to… Carl Henshall : Customisable Shrinkwrap Solutions, John Renfrew : Supercharging PDF, and Fabrice Nordmann : Using xml structure within FileMaker.
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