DevCon 2009: Summary and “Takeaway Points”

I was asked about the "big takeaway points" from DevCon 2009. Here's my take: * With Script Triggers, it is now possible to safely open up and take advantage of FileMaker's native user inteface. In other words, you can give serious consideration to displaying and unlocking the status area -- something a lot of us have been locking down for years, for fear that our users might end up somewhere

DevCon 2009: Day 3 Recap

This was the last day of DevCon 2009, and it was a short one. Here's a final recap...My first session today was Geoff Coffey's "Practical Script Triggers." Geoff did a great job of showing us how we can very easily use script triggers to make big improvements to our solutions. His demonstrations included highlighting of the active record in list view, a technique for safely allowing a user from

DevCon 2009: Day 2 Recap

Day 2 of DevCon was a blast. Once again, I was attended a lot of great sessions. Here's my experience...The first session that I attended was Albert Harum Alvarez's "The Idiom of FileMaker: What's New, What's Old, What's New Again." I've attended Albert's FileMaker Design Master Class in the past, and that was a great experience -- a real eye opener with regard to how I design solutions. So my

DevCon 2009: Day 1 Recap

Wow, what a great first day of DevCon sessions. Here's a recap of some of the events and sessions that I attended:First off, I skipped the "Continental Breakfast," and from what I hear that was a very wise decision. Instead, I hit the StarBucks in the lobby before a line had formed. I had a nice caffeine buzz going before the first session even started.The first session that I attended was

DevCon 2009 PHP User Group Meeting: A Recap

The PHP User Group meeting at DevCon 2009 was informal yet very informative. This was the first "technical" event that I attended this year, and I'm glad I did.Joel Shapiro (http://www.jsfmp.com/) started the meeting by demoing a FileMaker / PHP-based site that he has developed for NASA's Life Sciences Data Archive. He also demonstrated TCPDF (http://www.tcpdf.org/), an open source PHP class that