24U News

FileMaker Platform is ideal match for startups

Everyone knows or feels that starting a new business is not easy. There are many startups in these days. Every new company looks for the best possible systems to support their new ideas. We found out that our favourite FileMaker platform is an ideal match for these startups.

Sheep Sorting Is No Longer a Nightmare with 24U Phidgets Plug-In

Counting sheeps may put anyone asleep but for a sheep farmer sorting sheep a real madness and commercial solutions are too expensive. Therefore one developed a new solution powered by the FileMaker® platform and 24U Phidgets Plug-In!! Our customer Jacques Kirouac from Quebec developed a new solution Sheep Sorter which works on FileMaker Pro.

Become a Troubleshooting Hero!

You know what it feels like to be the hero who has just fixed “the thing”. Imagine you have spent hundreds or thousands of hours developing your solution, and now you’re ready to deploy it. Is your work done? The truth is that until now you have been playing your favorite game. Now the real life begins.

App Helps with School Grades

My son Štěpán recently surprised me by bringing an insufficient grade from a math exam. He needed to improve quickly, so I launched FileMaker Pro Advanced and decided to create an app to help him. The next day he got the best grade for a followup exam, not making a single error…

Life before and after Xgode

We can build native iOS apps with the FileMaker platform but we struggled doing that too often. Xgode has changed this for us, and now it is not an exception when we build a FileMaker based native app more than five times on the same day. Why is the life after Xgode so different from the life before it?

Google Maps become affordable

Since the introduction of WebViewer, Google Maps were quite popular in FileMaker solutions. What many FileMaker developers may have missed though is that in most cases they were using Google Maps API illegally and Google could ban their API key or IP address from accessing the feature at any time.

Echoes of the Past

As time passes by, we quickly and easily get used to new technologies and new versions of all the apps we use. Occasionally, the history decently knocks on the door, checking if we remember. Just like recently, when a customer contacted us, asking for help with converting his invoicing solution, made in FileMaker Pro 1.0, to the current version.

Product Testing for Constant Improvements

We’ve been developing FileMaker plug-ins since the release of FileMaker Pro 4, so some of our products have been there for our users for over a decade. We would like to share with you a few notes on how to make a product successful, no matter how precisely you plan the future of your product.

Compression vs Encryption

Many years ago, when designing backup strategy for our server, we decided to take advantage of one typical aspect of FileMaker databases. By using a simple bash script, we could easily keep a history of 4 times more backups than without compression...

Perform Script On Server

The idea of being able to off-load time consuming tasks from FileMaker Pro to FileMaker Server is as old as the scripting abilities of FileMaker Pro, which were introduced with the FileMaker Pro 3 release. But it was the FileMaker Server 13 that finally made this idea easy to implement.

Save the Planet Through Automated Planting

These brothers created the first mobile system for automated planting and we are really proud that we can the part of it. This system will not only make planting easy but it can really help us to save our planet. You can plant anything, anywhere in the world. Tomatoes in a desert, strawberries in a cellar, in a few years maybe on Mars as well.

Text or Numbers - What's Faster

One of the questions I am getting from time to time since I testing FileMaker performance is whether there is any significant difference between performance of text and number fields, So I tested it and discovered that there is even a case when indexed field can be slower than an undindexed one.

Safe Housekeeping

When you have a FileMaker solution that you have developed and used over a long time, you are likely to have objects like scripts, table occurrences, value lists, custom functions or layouts, that you don’t use any more. Once in a while you probably want to delete some of them to remove their impact on your solution’s size and performance.

How and why I won the FileMaker DevCon Developer Cup

When the first FileMaker DevCon Developer Cup took place at FileMaker DevCon 2014 many people asked me why I was not participating. So I applied for the next one in 2015. I was selected out of the over 1500 attendees to be one of 12 actually competing, and I won both the separately evaluated design challenge and the whole contest as well.

Team Development

The good thing about growth is that you’re getting stronger. You can deliver more work in less time and provide more unique values to your clients, such as stability, reliability, or variability. The difficult part is to make the team work together like clockwork.

Client Offload

In the last article I mentioned I attended Pause[x]Berlin 2013 with my team and gave you the video recording of my session Optimization Madness. I'm glad to tell you that I have one more recording from this event for you. We also recorded Fabrice Nordmann's session Client Offload.

Optimization Madness

In May, I participated in Pause[x]Berlin 2013, a European format of the popular unconference Pause On Error, organized for FileMaker developers by FileMaker developers.. There I presented a session called Optimization Madness focused on optimizing performance of FileMaker solutions.

Tamagotchi - Ready for the Future

Several years ago, when Tamagotchi became popular, I thought it was a good way to teach a kid how to take care of a pet, without an actual risk of hurting or killing one. Back at that time I had no idea that the meaning of this toy was much deeper...

Why is FileMaker 12 slow?

A lot has been written and said since FileMaker 12 was released about its speed, compared to FileMaker 11. Emotions left aside, if I was supposed to compile all the recent findings into a single brief message, I would say that some people find FileMaker 12 slower than FileMaker 11 while others experience improved performance.

Marvelous Optimization #4 - Optimized Again

Last September I wrote an article about a custom function that I optimized to evaluate hundreds times faster. At the end of the article, I challenged my readers and myself by claiming that the already optimized custom function can be optimized even further. Do you remember? Later on I actually really optimized it again, and talked about this.

Marvelous Optimization #1

This is the first example I was showing in my session Marvelous Optimizations at Pause On Error [x] London 2011. I already wrote about this optimization some time ago. It’s the one that led me to unveil the Marvelous Optimization Formula. I took the example and added FM Bench Detective into it to be able to exactly measure and examine what happens.

Debugging Scripts by Writing to Event.log

This is a fresh story of me spending hours trying to fix a technical issue and accidentally revealing a gold nugget. A few days ago one of my nightly server-side scripts stopped working without any apparent reason. But when I tried to run the script in FileMaker Pro it worked just fine. I really needed a way to debug the script on the server.

Random Set of Records (optimized)

I noticed that one of the articles updated in the official FileMaker Knowledge Base on September 23, 2011 was explaining how to select a random set of records in a FileMaker database. I was wondering how fast the currently recommended technique is and whether I can make it faster with the help of FM Bench.

Custom Function Optimized to Evaluate Hundreds Times Faster

Experts in optimization and hardware integration, platinum member of the FileMaker Business Alliance. We build custom apps, FileMaker plug-ins, native apps for Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android, we are able to to integrate even hardware and software noone has integrated before.

FileMaker Custom Function for HTML Entities

Just today I needed to decode HTML encoded text in FileMaker. After checking few functions I found one that seemed pretty good. Written in 2009 by Fabrice Nordman and named HTMLencoded2Text, this custom function was converting my imported text OK at first sight.

5 reasons for not attending FileMaker DevCon

To attend or not to attend? That's the question I am asking myself every year since 2002 when I attended my first FileMaker DevCon. I have attended 8 DevCons so far, and skipped one. I have identified the following 5 possible reasons for not attending:

Mac OS X 10.7 Lion - Upgrade or Wait?

Everyone is excited about Lion. Even though many new features on Mac OS X 10.7 are giving us improvements we kept asking for since 10.1, Apple has again succeeded in giving all the new features the strong essence of innovation that makes us unable to hesitate to install and try Lion out as soon as we are able to.

PHP Debugging & FileMaker Custom Functions Do Exist

I have just read Anders Monsen's post "Read on Mightydata's blog" A Simple Debug Function for PHP at the "Open the Mightydata's blog" Mightydata's blog. My first thought was this is similar to what I have been doing since I learned PHP a few years ago.

Blog Moved

I have just finished switching my blog from Posterous to a self-hosted WordPress.org based site. You may have noticed I mentioned this idea on Twitter some time ago. I had mainly three reasons for this change:

Infinite Hierarchy

Last week Hal Gumbert mentioned on Twitter that he was “working on a FileMaker quote to display and edit a BOM ( Build of Materials ) that can go 9 levels deep.” Probably the most efficient and user friendly way to implement this is using a tree view with collapsible/expandable items.

FileMaker Script Execution Time Cut From 5 Hours To 6 Seconds

Sometimes, not often, I accidentally achieve results that look too marvelous to be real. But they are. Just like in this case. Last week I assigned Petr, our internal system developer, the task to optimize one server-side script. The script recently started taking over 8 hours to run and reaching the expiration limit we have set for it.

Per-Database FileMaker Plug-Ins

Hal Gumbert has started an interesting topic on Twitter today. This topic quickly turned to be full of ideas and opinions. Way more than can reasonably fit in Twitter’s message length limit. Check this article where is interview between HOnza and Hal.

FileMaker PHP Error 7 (Running Out Of Memory) resolved

Yesterday I got so stuck with an issue that I wanted to send a question to a mailing list. But (un)fortunately I sent it from a wrong e-mail address so it did not reach the list. Then, before discovering that I used the wrong e-mail address I actually resolved the issue, so now I can share this for the case it can help someone.

Designing Buttons in Pages [updated]

When developing a software (FileMaker solutions, iOS apps in my case) we often need nice looking user interface elements such as buttons. I do not always have time to wait for a designer to create them. Now I don’t have to, because I have discovered I can quickly do that using Apple’s Pages.

24U Net Remote Demo video

I have recently uploaded a new demo video of 24U Net Remote to the Net Remote’s website. It’s the best video I have ever created, so I wanted to show off. See how you can use 24U Net Remote to conrol websites, desktop applications, FileMaker solutions, and external devices from your iPhone or iPad…

First Lessons from Developing for FileMaker Go

In the old times before FileMaker Go, before tab control, before anchors, before multiple windows per file, in the age of 13-inch CRT monitors, the most frequent challenges I was facing when developing FileMaker solutions were how to fit all the necessary information and what to put in empty area.

Indicate Progress in FileMaker Go and 11

When I was preparing a sample file for the How To Prevent Support Calls video I wanted to make it as cool as possible, so I decided to optimize it for FileMaker Go. I quickly discovered that I need a plug-in free alternative for the progress dialog. I wanted something nice looking while still as easy to implement as 24U SimpleDialog Plug-In.

24U SimpleDialog Plug-In 4.0 Special Offer [updated Jul 24, 2010]

New SimpleDialog 4 was released. Here are some important changes: New dialog field type: list can be used to offer selection to the user FileMaker Pro styles can be used to enhance dialog readability Dialogs can be updated on the fly Validations work for all field types (text areas, pop-up menus) Progress dialog has been fixed so it does not block

Stay Independent

Do you use FileMaker plug-in? Why? Let’s try something. Stop reading now, scroll down to the Comments section and answer these two questions. I am seriously curious about your answers. Then scroll back up and read the rest of this article. While only hours are remaining for the new SimpleDialog to get released, let me tell you one more story.

Prevent Support Calls [updated July 29, 2010]

After being silent for a while, busy preparing a new product launch, I am now back and cannot wait to tell you what you all probably guessed already. Pssst, rumors have that an all new SimpleDialog is rolling out. But before I confirm or deny the rumors, I have a story for you.

Top 10 things I like about #FileMaker 10

Over a year has passed since the FileMaker 10 family of products was released. Do you still hesitate to upgrade? I am constantly meeting customers who have not yet upgraded to the latest version of FileMaker Pro and FileMaker Server, so I have decided to share my top ten reasons why "ten" is so great.

Top 10 things I hate about #FileMaker Pro 10

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The best 10minute workflow to demo #FileMaker at a press conference

I am preparing a 10minute demo for a press conference where I will be showing FileMaker to journalists who have never seen it and have no idea what it is about. After a short brainstorming on Twitter I have come to the following idea as a workflow to show how cool FileMaker is:

I have got my #FileMaker branded flash drive

Experts in optimization and hardware integration, platinum member of the FileMaker Business Alliance. We build custom apps, FileMaker plug-ins, native apps for Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android, we are able to to integrate even hardware and software noone has integrated before.

News, tips, advice, ideas, experience…