AppWorks would like to announce the new version of Matt Navarre’s highly-acclaimed fmSearchResults for FileMaker!
fmSearchResults 5 download delivers many new features, greatly simplified implementation, a new theme, natural triggered search, and faster performance. But the biggest new feature is the price — it’s offered as a free download under a Creative Commons license.
Creating and maintaining two separate sets of application screens in FileMaker — one for mobile and one for desktop — has always been a pain in the butt. While there are definitely arguments to be made for creating much simpler functionality and screen design on an iPhone, the same argument is harder to make for an iPad versus desktop interface. Believe it or not, many people these days are opting to use ONLY a tablet with an attached keyboard as their primary work machine. Often, this occurs in the same workplace, where some users are on an iPad, and others are using a desktop computer.
Yeah, I know. How can you really be excited about something like FileMaker portals? And what is a portal anyways? Well, maybe YOU can’t get excited about them, but we at AppWorks can, and I’ll tell you why: Because portals are used all the time in FileMaker development, and there are two huge new time-saving options in the FileMaker 17 portal creation dialog box — “Show records from Current Table” and “Show records from New Add-on Table”. Each of these options on its own can save us an hour or more of development time, up front, which makes the initial setup of a new file much, much quicker, especially considering how frequently portals are used in FileMaker projects. Which means we can spend more time on the fun stuff, like improving the UI, adding features, and refining the user experience, and all for the same end cost.
With the release of version 16, FileMaker developers finally have the ability to natively pass and parse multiple script parameters . This is made possible by the new JSON functions — specifically, the JSONSetElement function and the JSONGetElement function. There are various methods and syntaxes FileMaker developers have been using for passing multiple parameters to and from scripts, but the most common one I’ve come across is key-value pairs in the format “key1 = value1 ; key2 = value2 ; key3 = value3” etc. This is a nice simple format, but it has some limitations. The new method in 16 is to pass a JSON object, with a series of elements that form the key-value pairs, and parse those elements out of the JSON object in the sub script.
The FileMaker platform enables us to build software very quickly – far less time than the typical software development cycle. With the ability to construct a working piece of software so fast, it’s easy to “rough in” a quick user interface that gets the job done (whatever that job may be), but may not be very intuitive to use.
The most intuitive software needs little or no explanation. The user intuitively knows how it works, either from visual cues, conveniently integrated documentation, or through the use of conventional UI techniques that people already understand.
