FileMaker Developer Conference 2010 Recap
Third year at Devcon
At this point I’m neither a newbie, nor an expert but that did not keep me from enjoying the conference. For those of you who could not make it: it was a great conference, and I highly recommend coming to next year’s Devcon! I would like to thank everyone at FMI, Delphina Daves in particular, for putting together an excellent conference!
So, first thing first, I got there a couple of days early, so I can get ready for the craziness. Got terribly sick the moment I landed, but did not keep me in my room. The first night of devcon was the Speaker Dinner, which removed most early birds form the hotel vicinity. I scooped up the remaining folks, put them in a van and headed to Little Italy to a hole-in-the-wall mom and pop restaurant. The meal was great, so was the company and when the bill came–with drinks–it came out to $20/per person. Compared to NY prices that was peanuts.
No worries, I am not going to get into a detailed breakdown of every day and every minute. I just would like to recap the highlights (food is always a good conversation starter).
Some of the sessions were clearly repetitive for me, but I believe they were trying to target a general audience. I did find, however a couple of sessions where I felt like an infant at a nuclear physics class.
We had a lot of exciting new products at the Product Showcase from what I learned
- how to operate a train from an iPad via the 24U Phidgets Plug-in;
- how the new SyncDeck plug-in from WorldSync allows you to perform audit logging from the server;
- from Acordex that the amazing Fujitsu Scanners lets you scan directly into FileMaker with (I actually own an earlier model that I can only scan into Evernote from–not complaining, though)
I had the chance to talk to the developers and ask them all the questions I could. I also had the pleasure to witness how Winfried Huslik from fmdiff examines and repairs damaged FileMaker files. Meanwhile, FileMaker Inc. was shooting videos for the “Meet the Developer” series. It was a busy scene.
Above ground everything that was presented is worth sharing. My exclusion of anything is not meant to offend anyone, but these are the sessions I would like to talk about and here’s why.
David Knight – Trigger Happy
This session demonstrated the myriad ways you can use your triggers from using them to provide visual feedback with charting to how to play “Pong” with FileMaker layouts. Ok, that was a bit more on the funny side, as opposed to being useful. What I took away from this session is how to locate words within a large body of text by using highlight. This is very useful when searching large blocks of text.
Colleen Hammersley – FileMaker & Microsoft Office: Content Sharing For Mere Mortals
Even thought I’m an avid Mac user, I can clearly see the te benefits of this session. If you are on Windows, you must be using Microsoft Office. One thing we, Mac users don’t get is connectivity between Word, Excel, PowerPoint and FileMaker that easily. On Windows, you can use XML and can perform rather tricky operations such as creating questionnaires in Word then get the data back into FileMaker. Pretty neat stuff!
I missed Alexandra Gebhardt’s Using Video and Social Media to Promote Your Business Session, but I learned that my barcode scanning video was featured. Thanks, Alex!
Michael Lee – SQL to the Rescue: An Introduction to SQL Reporting In FileMaker Itself
Ever wanted to do a cross-tab report in FileMaker? Or combine different reports on one layout? With the power of SQL you can. This one was one session where I felt the water closing above my head and realized I have a lot to learn. One reason I love FileMaker (aside from it’s agility) is its inter-connective options. I asked Mike to do a recap for me in the near future. Hell, I’m even willing to pay for it!
Important tidbits I learned outside of sessions:
- Apparently the form layout works faster than the table layout. If in doubt, test it yourself.
- Ther are lots of different ways to work with recursive custom functions (wonderful session by Ray Cologon, that was a bit above my level of comprehension) and even though they get you the same results, some prove to be much faster than others in certain situations.
- Getting information from related records: “Copy All Records” script step is much faster than looping through records or any other method. So, if you’d like to get the IDs of a set of records and put them all in a global so you can related to them, use “Copy All Records”.
- Backup, backup, backup. Make clones, make clones automatically from Server 11.
We also had a lot of great dinners and round table conversations. I am grateful to ALL the great minds out there, including Ray Cologon, Katherine Russell, Shin Ninagawa, Geoff Coffey, Jesse Antunes and John Sindelar who let me pick their brains (apologize to those I may have missed). It is great, indeed, to be part of this crowd.
See you all in the near future in one city or another!
