How do you present rich text field data on a FileMaker layout, and allow users to scroll, select, and copy it, but not make changes? We recently had to do this, and found it more challenging than we’d expected. We discovered two very different ways to do this; both are flexible, lightweight, and will scale well as a solution grows over time.

One of the most valuable aspects of this year’s FileMaker Developers Conference was a far-reaching discussion of the role of design in the FileMaker world. A broad range of speakers presented an exciting new view of design as an interactive process shared by developers and users alike. This new vision of design suggests several new possibilities and poses some intriguing questions for the FileMaker community.

Got white space? Here is a FileMaker custom function that hides the portal scroll bar if there are no additional records to display. This is the first post in a series on building a different kind of FileMaker-based contact management solution that looks and behaves like the OS X Address Book.

Seasoned and aspiring FileMaker ninjas will want to have this free utility in their tool belts. Syntax highlighting, code snippets, documentation, and even direct access to FileMaker’s clipboard!

Learn how to interact with files on your Mac from within FileMaker. Actually, just grab the functions from this demo and start doing it. No learning required!

Todd Geist and Jon Sindelar are releasing a new product called GoZync. It’s essentially a push-pull framework for deploying mobile solutions, especially with FileMaker Go. Here’s a recap of their recent presentation at the DIGFM FileMaker developer meetup.

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.