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Part 2: What Should You Consider When Selecting a Development Partner? What Questions Might You Ask a Potential Developer?
Figuring out how to choose a great developer can be bewildering without some insight about what to look for. In this segment of our seven-part series on choosing and working with a custom app developer, we will eXplore some tips on how to vet developer candidates.
Hiring a developer is about creating a working relationship. You want someone who gets your business
The FileMaker Script Debugger is powerful. Its features are often overlooked. In this post we examine the buttons that control stepping through a script.
The post Like a Boss: Using the Script Debugger to its Full Potential appeared first on Geist Interactive.
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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
In the past year and a half here at Geist Interactive, I’ve been tasked with some development work that involves connecting to various APIs. I’ve written modules for clients that get definitions, other forms, synonyms and antonyms, hypernyms and hyponyms of a term from the client’s internal dictionary and such public dictionaries such as Oxford […]
The post HTTP Request: I don’t know how, but it works appeared first on Geist Interactive.
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The FileMaker Let function is your tool to make a calculation readable, well formatted and easy to debug. Let us discuss how it can be used.
The post Like a Boss: Let us Discuss the FileMaker Let Function appeared first on Geist Interactive.
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ST. LOUIS, Missouri -November 30, 2012- Skeleton Key, an accomplished team of technology consultants who solve business problems, is pleased to announce the re-branding of their Information Technology division into sister-company, Brightsource IT.
Founded in 2004 with headquarters in St. Louis, Skeleton Key has maintained two successful divisions: Application Development and Information Technology. The Application Development side of the company builds custom-fit business tools and reportin
Recently we’ve been looking at how well FileMaker scales. Typically we need to consider this when faced with large volumes of data or high loads caused by user demands on the system. One of the recent instances where we’ve have to closely examine performance was with a call centre client. The system has a large...
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Welcome to the third installment in this series. We’ve been exploring various issues and behaviors in connection with 2-column value lists (VL’s), and today we’re going to look at, and propose a work around for, an issue with filtered value lists in Find mode. All of today’s demo files feature a basic expense submission system, [...]
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Just over a week away and Jason’s getting ready for his session at DevCon Tokyo. Big thanks to Shin at fmgateway for the timely translations and local support!
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In part 1 we explored a particular type of value list: the field-based two-column variety, based on all values, and set to show values from the second column only… …and today’s article assumes familiarity with that material. This time around we’re going to look at some challenges and issues that can arise when using filtered [...]
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FM Academy Webinar - Skeleton Key: FileMaker Server - Beyond the Admin Console
Join Us Thursday, November 15th for a free one-hour webinar at 2pm (EST) / 1pm (CST) / 11am (PST). Hosted by Alan Kirtlink at Skeleton Key, we will show you how to select and configure the ideal server for your organization. <p>
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Join Us for a Custom Business App Workshop at Apple Store - West County Center
Join Mark Richman, Skeleton Key, on Tuesday, November 13th at the Apple Store, West County Center from 8:30am to 10am (CST). Mark will host App Spotlight : FileMaker workshop.
During the workshop, Mark will expertly demonstrate how FileMaker Go and FileMaker 12 make it easy for anyone to create custom business apps for iPad and iPhone.
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Beverly Voth has produced a PDF version of The Missing FM 12 ExecuteSQL Reference with some additional material not available in her original posting from October 19th. And the SQL4_fmdev2.fmp12 demo file has been updated with new queries. Thank you Beverly for this major contribution to the FileMaker community.
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I think this quote finally gets at what bugs me about so many FileMaker feature requests–the long lists of things that would somehow make one’s life as a developer easier:
Programmers are obsessed with ease rather than simplicity (thank you Rich Hickey for making this point); or, what t
he experience of programming is
instead of what
the resulting program is like
. This leads to useless conversations about semicolons and whether we need a preprocessor that eliminates curly braces. We sti
Follow-up to the recent 'FileMaker Training Series: FileMaker Server' Web Seminar
On Tuesday, October 16th, 2012 I delivered two web seminars for FileMaker Inc. to complete their three-part series on the FileMaker Training Series for FileMaker 12.
This post is my follow-up to that event, and includes links to resources I mentioned during that event, as well as a few relevant Questions & Answers I fielded via email afterwards.
If YOU have any questions that did not get answere
FM Academy Webinar - IT Solutions: Working With and Extending FileMaker 12 Starter Solutions
Join Us Thursday, October 25th for a free one-hour webinar at 2pm (EST) / 1pm (CST) / 11am (PST). The topic is, working with and extending the FileMaker 12 starter solutions, hosted by Jerry Salem at IT Solutions. Register here.
FileMaker 12 includes a whole new set of starter solutions built from the ground up for the new version of the product. They are beautifully styled using the new th
There seem to be many questions about the usage of SQL (Structured Query Language) with the ExecuteSQL function in FileMaker 12. This tutorial attempts to explain some of the SQL terms, if you are new to writing SQL statements. Since there are already many examples of how to write the ExecuteSQL queries, links to these [...]
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FileMaker does most of its processing client side. That means when a client wants to do a find, or show the result of a calculation, the data necessary to do the action is transferred from the server to the client and the client calculates the result. This is handy because you don’t need super powerful [...]
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FileMaker does most of its processing client side. That means when a client wants to do a find, or show the result of a calculation, the data necessary to do the action is transferred from the server to the client and the client calculates the result. This is handy because you don’t need super powerful servers and the amount of load put on the server itself is reduced. But there’s a tradeoff, in some circumstances, it can also be extraordinarily painful. If a lot of data needs to be moved, the t
FileMaker does most of its processing client side. That means when a client wants to do a find, or show the result of a calculation, the data necessary to do the action is transferred from the server to the client and the client calculates the result. This is handy because you don’t need super powerful servers and the amount of load put on the server itself is reduced. But there’s a tradeoff, in some circumstances, it can also be extraordinarily painful. If a lot of data needs to be moved, the t
Last week in part 1 we looked at four “outer join” reporting approaches. Two of them involved ExecuteSQL, and I ended that section with the plea: Of course it’s possible that you, dear reader, know some FileMaker SQL voodoo to speed things up, and would be willing to share? Well Dr. Osamu Noda of Japan [...]
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Join Mark Richman For This FileMaker Web Event
FileMaker Training Series: FileMaker Server
On Tuesday, October 16th, FileMaker invites you to “FileMaker Server,” the last session in a three part webinar series based on the new FileMaker Training Series for FileMaker 12. The webinar is from 8am - 9am (PST) / 10am - 11am (CST) / 11am - 12pm (EST).
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Some common themes are emerging from a number of GoZync deployments we’ve completed recently, and one of them is that folks need their sync to be modular. Even in one-task applications there isn’t just one kind of record being synced, or one sync environment. Here is what we’re seeing recently…
• Not all data has the same timeliness. In our construction inspection app inspectors need to get the textual data from the inspection back to the office immediately (so builders’ checks can be cut) but
Like a crazy hoarder I mistake the root cause of my growing mountain of incomplete work. The hoarder thinks he has a storage problem when he really has a ‘throwing things away problem’. I say I am ‘time poor’ as if the problem is that poor me is given only 24 hours in a day. It’s more accurate to say… what exactly?
…from here.
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Eliminate Double Data Entry
There are two things you can do in business to improve profits: increase top line revenue and cut costs.
Opportunities to increase top line revenue can be elusive, and often depend on forces outside your control. Preventing your staff from entering data two, three or even four times – on the other hand – is a prime opportunity to cut costs.
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Recently I had an on-screen reporting challenge, and decided to try several different approaches to see which would be fastest. Starting with two tables: one containing 20 Employees, and the other containing 2,000 Sales Data records for the current year… …display daily sales totals per employee in a seven-day grid, like so: Of course, as [...]
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Doug Alder of HomeBase Software out of Vancouver, BC posted an excellent explanation of locking down an iOS device to use an FM Go database in “Kiosk” mode, using the Accessibility options. While you’re there, check out his FileMaker Timeline (which isn’t working in Chrome for me, but in Firefox it looks great).
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