GEEKSHARKS - Part 2

Apple Fix

Posted on March 1, 2011 by Dirk Reynolds

I know, I know. Some of you hate Apple, despise OSX, scoff at the iPhone, and wouldn’t be caught dead wearing white earbuds. Some of you may even have a point. Droid does indeed rock, and Windows 7 has, against all odds, bucked Microsoft’s relentless and proud tradition of creating ever crappier operating systems. Linux? Well, any self respecting Linux user is not even reading this blog. They’re too busy recompiling their own print drivers. You know, for fun.

If however you are a fan of using technology, without feeling an irresistible urge to take it all apart, then chances are good that you have an Apple product somewhere in your household. Perhaps an iMac or a Powerbook laptop. If not that, maybe an iPhone, or an iPad. Still holding out? There’s no way there’s not at least one iPod somewhere in the house/car/gym bag. Let’s face it, only Microsoft employees own Zunes.

If you have Apple products anywhere, then your technolife will sooner or later begin to revolve around Apple’s products and in anticipation of the next best (or better) thing, their announcements. Apple is however, highly secretive. They love making the grand announcements, but they also hold the cards very close beforehand. If you need to know more than what’s at the Apple site, or in the Apple store, there are a few very good Apple news sites — dedicated to reporting on what’s going on with Apple’s new products, current products, and much much more. Hop on over to any of the following sites, and discover more about Apple and its inner workings than you ever thought possible. Good stuff to know if you’re trying to make sure you don’t buy a new laptop, only to see its better and faster upgraded version to be released two weeks later.

Posted in Tech Stuff | Tagged Apple, iPad, iPhone, Mac | Comments Off

Recurring Imports

Posted on February 28, 2011 by Dirk Reynolds

Sometimes, even when you have a Filemaker solution up and running, your team still needs to use their Excel sheets. Excel has been around forever, and (more importantly) is a seriously kick-ass program. So, if you have both Excel and Filemaker in the office, wouldn’t it be nice to ‘link’ them up on a permanent basis? Keep your master Excel sheet as you always have, but feed its data to your new Filemaker solution for improved analysis and sharing.

Well, no surprise, you can. Filemaker Pro 11 added a new feature last summer called Recurring Import, tailored specifically to connecting Filemaker to any Excel sheet you might have, and automating a new import from the Excel sheet to Filemaker whenever you want, with one click.

For example, your accounting team may be using Excel to track payments, debts, etc. — and with the Recurring Import, your sales team could always have up-to-date accounting data on all the accounts they deal with each day. The Recurring Import allows your Excel users and your Filemaker users to be in sync all the time. It’s an easy fix that makes two terrific apps even better. Go check out the short Recurring Import video on this page over at Filemaker (scroll down a bit once you’re there).

Posted in Data Wrangling | Tagged Excel, Filemaker | Comments Off

iPad 2 on its way

Posted on February 26, 2011 by Dirk Reynolds

iPad 2 announcment Apple never says anything officially beforehand, but it seems pretty clear that their latest announced ‘event’ (for next Wednesday, March 2) will be to unveil the next generation iPad. Nobody knows the specs yet, but aside from the normal hardware upgrades (faster, more storage, etc.) it’s widely expected to be thinner and also sport cameras for both stills and video. The video will be especially cool as it will enable video chatting.

For Filemaker enthusiasts the video is exciting too, because it may mean that we’ll be able to use the iPad as a scanner too. Could be very handy for data entry (inventory, POS checkouts, and more).

Although the iPad 2 is exciting, personally I’m also looking forward to seeing if any of the first generation iPads will drop in price. It would be fantastic to see a price reduction, as quite a few companies would start buying them for their staff in bulk if they hit the $300 mark. We’ll see. Stay tuned.

Posted in Tech Stuff | Tagged iPad | Comments Off

Gimme Speed. Thin Client Speed

Posted on February 24, 2011 by Dirk Reynolds

Gimme Speed Larger teams or businesses need their data to live on a server. This allows the data to be properly managed in one place, accessible to all from their own machines. When you have a server in the office, and everyone is hitting it on the LAN (Local Area Network), speed is never really an issue. The LAN is typically plenty fast. Filemaker for example thrives on a LAN. Its natural habitat.

However, as your team grows to multiple offices, or if they need to hit the server from the road, home, etc — then the bandwidth can become a problem. This is because Filemaker Pro is a ‘thick’ client, meaning when you access the data, you’re doing a lot of the calculations on your end (user side), instead of letting the server do the calculations (server side).

The speed issue can be solved in many ways. Improve your software architecture, optimize your solution’s layouts. Use a faster (dedicated) server machine, upgrade your routers, switches, and connection speed. You can get a faster machine for yourself too. This all helps. But none of it can get around the fact that you’re still using a thick client, with its inherent speed issues.

What you really need is some kind of set up where although you’re hitting the server remotely, your ‘work speed’ is not affected. Ideally it would be like your were sitting right there in the office, with full LAN speeds. In a perfect world, no matter your connection speed, you’d be zipping through the database, churning massive chunks of data, never ever experiencing any lag whatsoever. Well, after such a build up, it will come as no surprise, that you can.

The key is to use a proper ‘thin client’. A small piece of software that allows you to connect to a remote server, and use Filemaker as if you were sitting at that machine itself. One example of such a thin client is something we use here, called 2X Access from 2X Software (similar to the Citrix XenApp). It’s kind of like a VPN connection, but easier.

Browser Access

Using 2X Access, all you need to do is hit a URL on your browser, and then log in. Once you’re in, the thin client app launches Filemaker Pro on a virtual desktop, and you’re off to the races. Your entire user experience is the same as always, you’re using Filemaker, but instead of moving tons of data back and forth between your machine and the server — now you’re only moving the screen pixels. The difference between a normal Filemaker Pro remote session, and one using a proper thin-client like 2X Access is night and day.

The downside? Well, aside from having to make sure your hosting is setup properly (which is a good idea anyway, see To The Cloud, Professional Filemaker Hosting), you’ll be looking at a monthly fee per user to get this kind of speed. The outfit we use (Foxtail Technology) charges $35 per month per user. Most of our clients are happy to pay this, because the speed bump is truly significant. The users’ frustration levels drop to zero (no more waiting!), and everyone gets a lot more done.

Check out more about the 2X client app here on the Foxtail site.

Posted in Data Wrangling | Tagged Filemaker, hosting | Comments Off

Site & Software Project Planning

Posted on February 23, 2011 by Dirk Reynolds

Lists When planning, it’s important to share. This means taking your brilliant solution out of your head, and putting it onto something others can review and understand. During the begin phases you don’t want to over plan things, but you still need to get the big picture properly outlined so that others can get your vision, and of course, critique it.

Begin by jotting down key goals and features in a list, and then literally sketch out the various processes and layouts. Making some sort of visual ‘map’ is quite often the best way to really dig in. It’s certainly easier than actually coding a website, or hacking a database together. Sketching out how a system both works and looks allows the planners to share their ideas, think them through, and as needed, adjust them on the fly.

Pen and paper is a good place to start. A whiteboard is a must for any geek office. Mandatory in fact, by local ordinance, in Silicon Valley. There are also some very nice applications out there, specifically suited to visual planning. Our favorite over at ZWARM is OmniGraffle for diagrams, followed closely by OmniOutliner for the lists.

Once you’re ready to put your ideas ‘on paper’ — how do you do that? We can get bogged down in technical details here about how to properly build schemas, relationship entity diagrams, or data flow diagrams, but none of that is really that important when you’re starting out. The main thing is just get your ideas down so that you can easily share them with others. The most important ‘planning’ docs we use for new projects are the following:

Project Outline
Data Flow Diagrams
Wireframes

If your project has a clear set of these, you’re off to a great start. Here’s a little more info about all three of them.

Project Outline — This one is as simple as it sounds. A list of your project’s goals, features and audiences. Although simple, it’s very important. Why? Well, usually after a crew starts working on a project, it’s way too easy for them to drift off course, and wind up wasting time and resources on features that make no sense, nobody needs. Having a clear (and hopefully short) list of the solution’s goals front and center throughout the build will be the difference between a clear, sound and affordable solution, or a horribly bloated, useless, cost-sink. Key tip here, keep your user audiences in mind all the time. Always ask ‘who will be using this feature’?

Data Flow Diagrams — Your solution (or website) is meant to do stuff. The manner in which it does… whatever it does… consists of procedures. Data Flow Diagrams (DFDs) are used to reflect the solution’s various key procedures, stripped down to their simplest logic (yes or no steps). The logic needs to be simple, so that the developers can tell the computer how to handle each step in any given procedure. Pick any process, define when it starts, when it ends, and then work your way through it with a simple series of actions and questions (with yes or no answers).

Wireframes — Just another fancy for sketch really. A wireframe is nothing more than a simplified sketch of how you want your database, application, or website to look. But instead of focusing on colors or content, a wireframe strips it all down to simple lines so that the planners can focus on the layout’s key elements, such as the navigation, headers, footers, main body, lists, forms, etc.

Wireframe

Creating a wireframe for all your solution’s primary layouts is ideal for doing ‘dry runs’. Pretend that your wireframes already work, and see if you can navigate your way around. It’s a much better idea to tweak and edit your wireframes rather than actual code.

OK, so this post got a little longer than originally planned. Nonetheless, any new project that has solid documentation for the three areas mentioned above will benefit a great deal, and save you a lot of money.

Great software

Plus, working in OmniGraffle and/or OmniOutliner is actually a lot of fun too. And, most of their apps are available on the iPad or iPhone as well, which means extra wow-factor when you go to show off your new plans to the team. When you have time, go check out their products here. Lots of great tools, and decent pricing too.

Posted in Data Wrangling, Website Coding & Design | Tagged iPad, Planning | Comments Off

Snapshot Links

Posted on February 22, 2011 by Dirk Reynolds

Sometimes you’ll be searching through some data, and after much fiddling about, find a useful subset of data. For example, all the current accounts that normally order at least 3x a week, but for some reason haven’t placed any orders at all for the past 10 days. That would be a good list to look at, and share with the sales team.

However, if that particular list was hard to find, it may be unwise to rely on everyone else in your sales team to be able to find the same list too. After all, they’re sales people, not data wizards like you. Well, in Filemaker 11, you can now share your wizard list with anyone else by using the new Snapshot Link feature. All you need to do once you’ve found a good set of records, is go to File > Save Records As… and choose Snapshot Link.

It will create a small document that you can email to any other user. Once that user gets your Snapshot Link file, all they have to do is open it up, and they will see the exact same list you found. Easy, and elegant. target=”_blank”>Click here to read more about this handy feature on the Filemaker site.

Posted in Data Wrangling | Tagged Filemaker | Comments Off

Top 10 Instant Web Publishing No-No’s

Posted on February 21, 2011 by Dirk Reynolds

One of Filemaker’s least used, yet coolest, features is its ability to instantly publish your database to the web. That’s right. No HTML coding, no FTP’ing, no PHP, no nada. As long as you’re hosting your Filemaker solution with Filemaker Server, and have the IWP enabled, your database is pretty much 100% accessible via a web browser. All your users need to know is its location (IP address) and of course their username and password.

Now, that’s all fine and well, and like I said, a truly impressive feat of application engineering by the geeks over at Filemaker. But, not everything that’s possible in Filemaker is in fact fully web-compatible. This is primarily due to the fact that on the interweb, clients and servers are not constantly and continuously in contact with each other. Whereas with a normal Filemaker Pro or Filemaker Go client, without doing anything, you can see the database edits of others as they occur. However, on the web, using your web browser (Firefox, IE, Safari, etc.), you don’t see anything new until you decide to refresh your browser window. Either by clicking the Refresh icon, or by moving to a new page (which automatically also refreshes your browser). This is because unless you say so, and initiate an action, your browser’s not actually connected to your server. They’re both taking a breather, and will not talk to each other again unless you make them.

Select 'Web Publishing' in your script manager to find out what you and can't do.

So, this inability for your web browser to maintain state means it doesn’t work quite the same way as your normal Filemaker Pro or Go client. Combine that with the web’s inferior speed (compared to your LAN), and a few limitations put in by Filemaker itself in the IWP setup, and we’ve come up with a Top 10 list of things you might normally do in your Filemaker database, that you’d be better off to avoid if you want your database to be 100% fully ready to go in IWP mode.

No New Windows — if your solutions uses a lot of new windows in it, that’s gonna be a problem.
No Dynamic Value Lists — they’ll work, but slowly. If you have a big data set, and the dynamic values are complex, forget it. The speed, or lack thereof, will kill it. Stay away from dynamic value lists if you can.
No List Views (kind of) — ok, so not entirely true. There is a list view, but, to keep it succinct, it sucks. Limit to 25 at a time, and Filemaker hasn’t come up with a clean intuitive method of displaying or editing records in the list. If you can, just use portals instead.
No Rounded Corners — if you like rounded corners on buttons, or anywhere else on your layout, you’re out of luck.
No Conditional Formatting — One of the best most recent features of Filemaker, not available online. Really too bad. Conditional formatting is perfect for better UI’s.
No Script Triggers — Due to the web’s statelessness. Too bad. Script triggers are awesome.
No Dialog Boxes — A much needed tool, but not available online. In my IWP solutions I’ve built a global field element to take over this function.
No Automatic Commitment — Online, the data in your browser window does not make it to the server on its own. You’ll need to refresh, go to another layout, or trigger a script.
No File Insertion — You can’t insert a file, like Excel, Word, or a PDF in IWP (unless you use a plug-in, like SuperContainer from 360Works)
No Import or Export — No records can be imported or exported in the IWP setup.

Those are the ones off the top of my head. I’m sure I’ve forgot something. If so, send it this way. For most of them, there are work-arounds. The toolbox is still so vast, that a little ingenuity goes a long way, making your web version shine. Also, lest we forget, there is a vast and very powerful world of plug-ins out there too, but the plug-in post is a topic all its own, and best saved for another day.

Wow, that sounds a lot more negative than I thought it would. I guess I should make a list of the top 10 coolest things about Filemaker’s IWP capabilities, but really, do I need to spell it out? Despite the short list above, did I mention that you can publish your database to the web without any web coding? No HTML, no CSS, no PHP, no Javascript… none of that. You don’t think that’s impressive, then maybe a proposal from your local friendly PHP guru will set you straight (not to mention the constant upgrades and maintenance as your online database continues to evolve).

Posted in Data Wrangling, Website Coding & Design | Tagged Filemaker, IWP | Comments Off

Bento 3 – Free Kit

Posted on February 18, 2011 by Dirk Reynolds

Filemaker’s younger and simpler brother, Bento, is now offering a handy free demo and kit for its newest version (Bento 3). If you like databases, but hate all the programming bits, then Bento could very well be just the ticket for you.

It’s very Apple-esque, with pre-built design templates and themes. Pretty much just drag and drop, and presto, you have a professional looking database. It also ties directly to your iCal and Address Book (on a Mac), works seamlessly with your iPad or iPhone, and a whole lot more. The price is right too. Currently Bento 3 for the Mac costs $49. The Bento clients for iPad and iPhone are both just $4.99 each.

There are of course limitations. Bento is not a full-on database application. It may do a bunch database things, and certainly gives you considerable leeway to edit layouts, fields, etc. — but if you run into a wall trying to make it do something truly fancy, you’re pretty much SOL. That’s when you’ll need a proper database, like Filemaker. Also, Bento’s a Mac only application, but seriously, who uses PCs anymore nowadays anyway?

Bento 3. The best entry-level, DIY database around.

However, for an entry-level do it yourself database, it really doesn’t get any better or easier than Bento, and with their free demo and kit of goodies, you can’t go wrong by giving it a spin.

So if the idea of organizing recipes or contacts excites you, and syncing your data automatically to you iPhone or iPad really floats your boat, follow this link to their Free Kit page, or go here to learn more about Bento itself.

Posted in Data Wrangling | Tagged Bento, Filemaker, free, iPad, iPhone | Comments Off

The Ultimate Interface: Plain Language

Posted on February 17, 2011 by Dirk Reynolds

Watson, Trivia Master

First, 1′s and 0′s and cards. Then command-line typing, followed by GUI with mice, and now fingers. Some systems even offer voice-recognition, where you can actually tell the computer what to do by simply saying it. The voice thing’s getting better, but still a clunky way to work with computers, since the computer doesn’t actually understand you, it’s just waiting to see if what you’re saying matches a predefined set of potential commands.

Watson. IBM’s latest grand project (recently showcased on TV’s trivial quiz show Jeopardy!) is a significant leap forward. Watson’s key skill is its ability to take a normal English sentence, complete with idioms and odd grammar, and make sense of it. An easy task for humans, but up to now, impossible for computers. A truly significant feat of computer and software engineering by the IBM geeks.

All technical accomplishment aside though, it’s the potential that is truly exciting. If computers can now actually understand sentences, how much longer until they can understand conversations? At what point will they be able to attend meetings, and properly glean all that is said? When do they not just listen, but contribute? When do they start running the meetings?

Did I say exciting? Maybe I meant scary.

I have a feeling the initial uses will be stale and boring. We’ll ask computers to help us use the internet (no more Google, just ask Watson). We’ll give them more complex spoken commands. Business: ‘don’t forget to send all the invoices out on time next week’. Life Saving: ‘cross reference this MRI with all close matches worldwide, and run a diagnostic with the team’. Mundane: ‘I’m lost, find me the nearest organic local coffee shop… with free wifi’.

All very exciting, endless possibilities. Plain spoken language, the ultimate interface. A big reason programming is difficult is because we humans have to give our commands in a fashion that dumb linear computers will understand. If we can get computers to understand us instead that would be perfect. Pretty soon we’ll all be expert geeks.

Posted in Tech Stuff | Tagged AI | Comments Off