One of the primary tools we have available to us when designing user interfaces is color. Adding some categorization to your data using a little color can make it much more approachable and usable. The technique presented here will give you (on Mac OS X) a polished and robust Color Picker with no other requirements than a custom function and a global field. You can even set the default colors displayed on the Color Picker.

Can you build an Assets Management database in FileMaker Pro in 80 minutes? Thursday night we tried to do just that, in the DIG-FM Speed-Developer Challenge. Here’s the story of how it went…

Notes from Vincenzo Menanno’s session at PauseOnError on FileMaker User Experience (UX) for Developers“, brainstorming how to improve the tools that FileMaker developers themselves use. "I tried to frame the FileMaker UX discussion with this notion of little things make a big difference. Two key aspect to any UI — for end users or developers — are the notions of finesse and refinement. These links to UX/UI resources and examples were provided to get people inspired [and] there were a number of great requests and suggestions which I captured…"

In February, four of the Beez went to New York for PauseOnError, the annual winter “Unconference” gathering of FileMaker developers. Here’s an overview of our experience at the event.

Use sub-summarized parts and AppleScripted sorting to allow disclosure behavior in FileMaker Pro.

A user places their cursor in a field, runs a script, and Presto! A chart appears summarizing the found set of data from the selected field. This technique allows the user to point a chart toward a field of their choosing, so the developer needn't anticipate every field that the user might want to chart.

Creating a port forward on a Cisco ASA using the ASDM GUI.

I recently needed to total up some records in a found set in a FileMaker solution, but I wanted to keep all the revisions within the scripts so that I could easily migrate the changes from the development system to production. This solution also already had quite a few “special case” calcs and fields, and […]

We recently needed to remove the intermediate directories in a large number of parent directories. So, if we started with /A/B/C/D, we wanted to end up with /A/B/D. It seemed simple at the time, so I blithely said “Sure, I can write that easily as a shell script”.

Mapping hostname to wiki in OS X Server.

If you have a FileMaker system and you need to script the processing of adding or removing files on the server, the first problem you are going to come across is: how do I stop the server from a script? You may already be familiar with the fmsadmin command. This is present on both Mac […]