What's next?
Matthew Hardy of Real Estate Success Tools has put together a great video showing off how he’s using Zulu to link iCal and Google Calendar to his application.
Great overview and a link to the video here.
And if you haven’t seen his solution, REST, before, take some time to check out the site: it’s really well done. And as Matthew says, between Zulu and FileMaker his users can now interact with REST from any platform.
Beautiful stuff here… http://design-milk.com/2012-modern-calendars/
Especially this one from Calouette.
And if you need a shared calendar, SeedCode Calendar is on sale (and bundled with Zulu iCal Sync) though Dec 31st.
A lot of folks have been asking for the Virtual List example file we put together with Bruce Robertson, so here it is: VirtualList.zip
This Virtual List technique is part of what make our Calendar fast, and allows FMSearchResults to show records from different tables in the same ‘portal’. We demonstrated some applications of this at DevCon’s Year in Review in 2010 and 2011, showing how this can really speed up FileMaker displays, especially those formatted as columns, grids, or lists.
Todd Geist speaking at SOFA, Nov 2011
Todd Geist has also been speaking about this a lot, including last week in Toronto, where he demonstrated how we’re using it in Worx.
There was a also a great session on Virtual Lists at Pause[x]London. Sample files and recorded presentations here.
Are you using Virtual Lists?
We have a small subset of customers who wire their calendars up to act as dashboards on big displays. I’ve always thought this was cool and someday hope to get around to making one for SeedCode, a la the great dashboard at Panic.
One of these customers asked for something pretty cool today: they wanted to be able to cycle through the different resources on the calendar (recording studios in her system), showing each one on the week view for a few seconds, before moving to the next studio automatically.
Easy with a couple simple scripts and an OnTimer trigger. Feel free to add these to your own version of the calendar: AutomatedDisplayScripts.pdf
Sometimes the hard stuff turns out to be really easy.
It always impresses me that Jason has a way of finding the simplest ways of doing things. For example, when iCal treats a holiday as an all day event, SeedCode can pick that up as a two-day event. A customer asked about how to work around this, changing the iCal parser in SeedCode Calendar Pro.
Jason sent them this screen shot showing how you can more easily teach SeedCode to ignore the end date of the holiday calendar, after the iCal event is parsed. Love it.
Our customer loved it too and posted this on our support forum:
As a new user of Calendar Pro I am very impressed with the simplicity and power of the solution template. I’ve been using & developing in FMP for over a decade; I can’t believe how simple the relationship-table is for Calendar Pro. It’s an example I hope to follow more often in my other Filemaker work.
That’s what it’s all about.
This weekend, Todd Geist and I took the train up from LA for a 33 hour code sprint and built the start of Worx, the next file for GoZync.
This is a great way to work and we got a ton done.
Todd on the Coast Starlight
Worx is a work orders system for iPad: users in the office assign orders to technicians and those techs “zync” the orders down to their iPads before completing the orders. Orders come down with contact info, maps, and a serious items database capable of browsing and selecting from tens of thousands of items.
Here are some screen shots from the iPad side…
Contact management & maps in Worx on iPad
Item selector in Worx: please forgive the testing data
Selecting items: grid view
…and a short video of the office side showing the virtual list Todd created for our side bar. Nice stuff.
Worx will be available as a ready-to-go solution for GoZync that you can tie to your own hosted file or use on its own. More soon.
GoZync can be a little tricky to add to your file, this is why many people build out from our example FMGo file, and why we offer implementation packages to do it for you. Once it’s in, however, GoZync is quite easy to extend. It is a framework, after all, and we built it to be extensible.
We anticipated that you’d add fields to mobile solutions you already deployed–thus GoZync can deliver new builds to your users–and we made it easy to add fields to mappings you’ve already established. This video shows how easy it is to add a field to a zync’ed solution. The video also demonstrates the zync working in FileMaker Pro (GoZync can sync zync data between Pro and Server just as it does between Go and Server.) Check it out…
Very proud of the crew in the UK for pulling this off. Sessions look great; really wish I could get there.
Ian’s stuff on SQL in particular is very much in line with what we’re working on these days. SQL + Virtual List = Happy. Other’s I’m looking forward to… Carl Henshall : Customisable Shrinkwrap Solutions, John Renfrew : Supercharging PDF, and Fabrice Nordmann : Using xml structure within FileMaker.
Here is a short video showing how we’re collapsing GoZync’s left hand side bar as you rotate your iPad.
For another gorgeous example of this technique, and more details, check out Yann Liqueur-Salzedo’s work here.
