FileMaker Game Changers for 2010

It seems that each year there are a few things that happen - new functionality is added to FileMaker, new third-party products and services are released, and so on - that significantly change the way we do FileMaker development and conduct business. This year has been no exception. In fact, I can't remember a year where so much has happened that has had such a profound, positive impact on my business.

What follows are four of what I've been calling "game changers." If FileMaker development were a game (and it can be so much fun at times that it feels like one), then these are the things that would cause us to rewrite the rulebook.

Value-Based Billing

Call it what you will - value-based billing, fixed price contracts, etc - all I know is that it works. I'll admit that I was very skeptical about the concept when it seemed to take the FileMaker world by storm a year or so ago. It was all the buzz at Devcon 2009, and was even the focus of a very interesting informal session held by Jonathan Stark (of Jonathan Stark Consulting), Kirk Bowman (of MightyData), Jesse Barnum (of 360Works), and Molly Connolly (of Thorsen Consulting). I can't think of any other non-technical issue that seemed to cause so much controversy in the community.

It was in that DevCon session that I realized that I really needed to give the concept a try. The benefits that the speakers described were numerous and very compelling. It seemed that this just might be what I needed to resolve some of the issues that I was facing with my business.

And so early this year, I tried it - and haven't looked back since. I won't go into all the details in this post, but I will say that with value-based billing, I'm making more than ever before (my effective hourly rate is greatly improved), I'm less stressed, and my clients -both new and existing - seem happier as well.

Of all of the "game changers" that I've come across, this one has by far had the biggest impact in terms of the success of my business.

Letting FileMaker be FileMaker

When FileMaker's own Rosemary Tietge first started talking about how, with the recent enhancements to FileMaker, it was now safe to fully expose the FileMaker interface to users, I scoffed. You see, like many FileMaker developers who've been working with FileMaker for awhile, I've found that exposing too much of the native interface and functionality can be very dangerous.

If you're like me, you remember those times when a user stumbled upon the "delete all records" or "replace field contents" functions, thought to themselves, "Hmm, I wonder what this does?" and then proceeded to inflict major damage to the database that you worked so hard to develop for them.

But the more that I thought about it, the more I realized that Rosemary was right. Using things like custom menus (which have come a long way over the years), script triggers, and so on, you really can safely expose the FileMaker Interface to your users.

So, does it work? It has for me! My development process seems to be much faster, especially with regard to the interface. Gone are the days of hiding and locking the toolbar, of having to create record navigation scripts and buttons, of searching for that perfect icon that represents a certain function. Users now realize how robust FileMaker is, and that FileMaker is much more than the solution that I've developed for them. But perhaps best of all, I can give users easy access to some of the newer FileMaker functionality such as QuickFind, saved finds, and more.

Turns out that you can teach an old dog new tricks after all!

ScriptMaster

I've mentioned in previous blog posts that I used to have an aversion to FileMaker plug-ins. In the past, if one of my solutions needed to do something that FileMaker couldn't do using native functionality, I just didn't bother with it. But over the years, as the complexity of the solutions that clients have asked me to build has increased, I started to see the light.

I'm still very cautious about the plug-ins that I use, and over the past few years I've tried to find high-quality, reliable plug-ins that can do a number of different things. Scodigo's SmartPill plug-in has been a favorite for the past few years (allowing me to use my PHP experience to solve some insanely complicated problems), as have a few of the plug-ins that Troi and CNS have put out.

A few months ago, I took a second look at the latest release of ScriptMaster (version 4), the general purpose plug-in that Jesse Barnum and the folks at 360Works develop and support. What makes this plug-in unique is that you can use the Advanced version to develop your very own plug-ins, which you can distribute with your solutions.

I've only started to explore all that ScriptMaster is capable of, but with it's ability to utilize existing Java libraries, the possibilities seem endless!

FileMaker Go

Since Apple's introduction of the iPad in January, demand for iPad apps, and inquiries from clients about how they might use the iPad to access their FileMaker databases have been pouring in. Whether from new clients or clients that I've been working with for years, it seems that everyone was interested in finding a way to use the iPad for their business.

So when FileMaker Go hit the App Store in July, I was relieved. At last I could provide those clients with the solutions that they were asking for, and best of all, could do so using FileMaker itself. No need to build a web based solution, or worse, learn Objective C.

And oh boy, was FileMaker Go worth the wait! I knew that FileMaker was working on something for the iPad, but had no idea of what to expect. It has turned out to be an amazing simple yet extremely powerful app.

So there you have it. What things have rocked your (FileMaker) world this year? Let us know!

2010 FileMaker Salary Survey

We're happy to announce that the 2010 FileMaker Salary Survey is now underway!

Have you ever wondered how your salary stacks up against other FileMaker professionals? Thinking about becoming a FileMaker developer and wondering if you can make a living doing so? Yeah, we've been wondering, too...

So we worked with Andy Gaunt and his team over at FMPug to put together this survey. Our goal is to learn about the salaries that FileMaker professionals make and the various things might impact them. For example, does where you work make a difference? Does your experience come into play? Does getting certified result in a higher salary? We're doing our best to find out.

The information that is collected will be made available on the FMPug website (and subsidiary sites). And of course, everything will remain completely anonymous.

So if you use FileMaker in any way as part of your job, please take the survey: http://www.fmpug.com/survey/survey.php?sid=EF3658

Audrey Akhavan President FM Magic, Inc.

After a long hiatus from publishing interviews, we're back! Our first interview is with Audrey Akhavan. Audrey is well known in the FileMaker community due to her Twitter posts about FileMaker. Her contributions to the FileMaker community led to her winning the "Mad Dog Award" in 2009, and in 2010 she was awarded the "Evangelist of the Year" award. If you want to keep up with what's going on in the community, Audrey is the person to follow!

I had the privilege of interviewing Audrey recently, and the interview follows. Read on to learn how Audrey first became involved in FileMaker, what led her to form her own company (FM Magic, Inc.), and much more...


First, let me congratulate you on receiving the 2010 Evangelist of the Year award. What was it like to have won the award?

Thank you, Mr. Tim! It was a complete surprise. I am still thrilled, humbled and grateful to have been selected by my peers for this award.


How did you get started in IT?

At 18, I started working for the Arizona Department of Transportation’s Motor Vehicle Division. We were transferring hard-copy travel-trailer and mobile home title records into a DOS-based program running on an IBM main frame. This was my first introduction to computers. Although I caught on quickly and enjoyed the experience, I soon realized the software programmers did not focus enough effort on user experience and I wanted to change that.


How, and when, did you get started with FileMaker?

In 1994, I was hired by the Arizona State Mine Inspector’s Office to write the Mined Land Reclamation Rulemaking that would “fill in the blanks” of the Mined Land Reclamation Act of 1994 and establish the ways in which the privately-owned mines affected by the legislation would interact with the managing agency.

Not wanting to “reinvent the wheel”, I thought the best approach would be to start by collecting the rulemaking of other hard-rock and open-pit mining states in the southwestern United States. But how?

The Abandoned Mines Division was already using FileMaker 2.0 to catalogue abandoned mines throughout the state. Since FileMaker was the most readily-available tool for the job, I just dove right in. I’ve been in love with FileMaker ever since!

By the time I left the Mine Inspector’s office a few years later, we were using FileMaker to manage enrollment and payment for the Education and Training Division’s Mine Safety and Health classes, and we also used FileMaker to manage registration and payment for two annual Mine Safety & Health conferences sponsored by the Mine Inspector’s Office. We even used FileMaker to print our conference invitation letters, promotional materials, the conference schedules, the attendees’ name tags and more.

In every company I worked for since then, I have either converted their Excel spreadsheets and Access databases to FileMaker, or expanded their use of FileMaker.


Tell us about your company, FM Magic, Inc.

Officially, my company started in October of 2008 when I registered as a corporation, but over the years I’ve been supplementing my day-job income from time-to-time by moonlighting as a FileMaker Developer. When I left WorqSmart (aka Waves in Motion) in late 2008, I decided I wanted to work for myself. Now, exactly two years later, I’ve established great relationships with new clients and subcontractors while maintaining business relationships that have endured over the years, and I have no regrets about my decision to become self-employed.


Besides using FileMaker to develop solutions for your clients, what role does FileMaker play in the operation of your own business?

I use FileMaker for everything! From tracking contacts, clients, calls, communications, projects and billable hours to generating invoices. Some of the solutions I use for myself are a little outdated, but to borrow an expression, “The cobbler’s children have no shoes.” If I had more discretionary time, I could bring my older solutions up-to-date, but for now they work just fine.


What do you like best about your job? What do you like least?

There are so many things to like about my job! It’s hard to pick just one. While I really enjoy the freedom and flexibility of setting my own hours or learning about the business processes of my clients’ companies, the thing I get the most satisfaction from is delivering a solution or a feature to a client that *they* think is “magic!” Sometimes it’s just a really simple resolution to a nagging problem or an annoyance they’ve been working around for a long time. I love delivering solutions that make people’s jobs easier, that eliminate redundancy in data entry and increase data transparency (I’m channeling my inner Jason Mundok here).

What do I like the least? That would have be all the marketing and administrative tasks needed to keep everything running smoothly. Definitely necessary, but not as much fun as talking with clients or building FileMaker solutions.


What are your favorite new features of FileMaker 11?

That’s another tough choice… Native charting? QuickFind? Quick reports? Snapshot links? Object badges in layout mode? Recurring Imports? The new Inspector tool palette?

For my clients, I think the new Quick Find feature is definitely a favorite. They’ve been asking for a “Google-like” find in solutions for years. With the advent of script triggers in FileMaker 10, this wasn’t too hard to reproduce, but FileMaker 11’s Quick Find now makes it super easy. I generally keep the FileMaker status area closed and I like to “roll my own” Quick Find into the user interface using a global field, an onFieldExit script trigger and the new Perform Quick Find script step. Best of all, it’s dynamic and portable; I just copy and paste the elements from one layout to another and it works beautifully, no matter what table I’m in.

For myself, I think the new Inspector tool palette is my current favorite feature. It took me a little while to get used to it, but now I love having three Inspectors open (one for each tab), which allows me to easily see and modify any layout elements.


If you could add some features to FileMaker, what would they be?

There are two things that come to mind right away. The first one would be what I’ll call, “Layout Style Sheets” or “Master Layouts” (kind of like CSS), so I can easily make interface changes in one place that would update all layouts based on that “layout style sheet” / “master layout” across an entire solution.

The other thing I would really like to have in FileMaker is color coding and indenting in the calculation window. For now, there’s a couple of third-party options. The first one, QuickCursor, came to me via Matt Petrowsky of ISO Productions, Inc., and allows you to edit FileMaker calculations in TextMate or other text editors: http://bit.ly/a4VJ3 (FileMaker 11 only). The second one came to me by way of Chad Sager, a consultant at IT Solutions Consulting, Inc., and is a filemaker-textmate-bundle http://bit.ly/bBCw6k.


What are your thoughts on FileMaker Go? How important is it to your business? And how important do you think it is to the FileMaker community?

Wow! FileMaker Go is HUGE… a real game-changer. I know everybody’s saying that, but it’s true. We’ve been wanting a real mobile application from FileMaker for years. Of course, I purchased a copy of both versions as soon as they were released, one for my iPhone and one for my iPad (which really validated that recent iOS purchase for me… hehehe).

For a version 1.0 release, FileMaker really delivered! I love FileMaker Go!

Version 1.1.1 has recently been released, and includes the three important features we were asking for: adding photos to your database and emailing them as an attachment, converting records to a PDF file and email them as an attachment and saving a copy of a database and emailing it as an attachment. I’m looking forward to future releases!

For my business and for the FileMaker community it has opened up new consulting opportunities with clients who want and need access to their data “on the go”.


What's your favorite tool, plugin, or technique for developing FileMaker databases?

I’m not a “FileMaker Purist” and so have no problems using plug-ins to extend the functionality of FileMaker. There’s so many great plug-ins available to make development easier and faster.

What I like most is reusable, portable and efficient coding (now I’m channeling my inner Geoff Coffey). Ever since I attended Geoff’s presentation on “DRY FileMaker”, I’ve been hearing, “Don’t’ repeat yourself” whenever I find myself doing some development task or script step more than once. When that happens, I stop and try to make what I’m working on more modular, more portable.

I also like little snippets of code that I find particularly clever, like using “(Abs (My_Table::Checkbox - 1)” in a Set Field script step to toggle a graphic checkbox “on” and “off”. These little code-snippet-gems make me really happy.


You are perhaps the most well known, most followed "Twitterer" in the FileMaker community. How did you get started with Twitter? And what led you to using it to evangelize FileMaker using it?

Considering my initial thoughts on Twitter, it’s really ironic that I now use it as much as I do.

At first, I simply did not “get” Twitter. I created a twitter account in May of 2008, but all I saw were posts about what someone had for lunch, or where they were going next, or random thoughts that had little value for me. I abandoned Twitter almost immediately and didn’t pick it up again until late 2008.

When I learned the value of hashtags (#) and how they are used to search for information, my appreciation for Twitter grew immensely.

In truth, I’ve been “evangelizing” FileMaker since I first started using it in 1994. Twitter (and other social networking sites like Facebook and Linked-In) just allowed my voice to carry farther and gave me access to a much broader audience. I love promoting the products, accomplishments, work, clever techniques, demo files and good news of others in the FileMaker community. My dream job would be to continue doing that on a larger scale while getting paid (really well) for it.


You're also the coordinator for the Phoenix chapter of FMPug. How has being involved in the group benefited you?

It’s one of the best ways to stay in touch with the local Phoenix developer community, and it also provides opportunities to spend time with other talented individuals in the larger FileMaker community who take the time to come to our meetings and present on FileMaker-centric topics that grow our knowledge base and help us become better developers.


You're a FileMaker 8 Certified Developer. Has the certification helped you? If so, how? And are you planning on getting certified on any of the more recent versions?

Certification definitely has value, and as more and more FileMaker developers become certified it becomes even more important to become certified. Having said that, I’ve never had a client ask me if I was FileMaker certified, and I can’t say I’ve won consulting opportunities on the basis of being certified. On the other hand, I can’t know how many potential clients do not contact me because I don’t have current certification.

Yes, I do plan to become FileMaker 11 certified. I’ve purchased the “FileMaker Training Series for FileMaker 11” and have started going through the modules.


What advice would you give to someone that is just starting to do FileMaker development?

My advice is to make sure you love working with people, which leads to the most important aspect of development: discovery and requirements gathering. You can’t do that in a vacuum. You need to be able to interact well with your clients; the business owners and managers, the subject-matter experts, the users and other stakeholders. If you’re not good at asking the right people the right questions and translating their answers into programming results, you’re not going to deliver solutions that people want to use.


What significant changes have you seen take place in the FileMaker world over the years?

The most significant change I’ve seen is one you recently wrote about on FileMaker Addict: “FileMaker - Respect at Last!”. As one who’s been developing with FileMaker for over 16 years, I’ve experienced the “constant struggle to explain what FileMaker is, to dispel the negative myths about it, and to try hard to convince people that they should give it a chance”

I’m happy to confirm this kind of FileMaker hard-sell has been changing and getting easier. Demand for FileMaker services is greater than I’ve ever seen, and I believe FileMaker Go helps make FileMaker more relevant than ever as a development tool and platform.


What technology has most changed your life?

I believe the Internet has most changed my life. Although it’s origins reach back to the late 1950’s, it wasn’t really available to the general public until the early 1990’s. I do everything online these days, from listening to music and watching movies and television shows… to shopping and paying bills… to client meetings and social networking. The Internet delivers the world to my desktop, laptop, iPhone and iPad… literally, at my fingertips. I’ve seen, heard and learned so much that would otherwise not have been available to me, I often wonder how we ever lived without it.


What are your favorite things to do that don't involve work?

My favorite things to do generally involve family. I come from a large family and enjoy the big celebrations we have a couple of times a year. Hanging out individually with my siblings is a lot of fun, too, but I especially enjoy spending time with my adult children. They are the smartest, most productive and funniest people I know.


What inspires you?

People who persevere and succeed in spite of disadvantages, obstacles and limitations really inspire me to work harder and be a better person. I’m usually supporting and cheering for the underdog, the black horse, the one who is underestimated. Seeing them do well really makes me happy and restores my faith in people in general.


What's next for you and/or your business?

Things have been going well for me (personally and professionally) and I plan to continue that trend. My business has really taken off this year and I’m working on increasing my knowledge, expanding my business to include even more diverse clients and working with even more super-talented subcontractors on even greater FileMaker projects.



Thanks, Audrey!


To learn more about Audrey, visit http://magicmakerpro.com/index.html, or follow Audrey on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/audreyrae.

FileMaker - Respect at Last!

A few days ago I got to thinking about how different it is to be a FileMaker developer today compared with a few years ago. Obviously, the technology has come a long, long way, as the product line has matured. Support for developers has also greatly improved, from both FileMaker Inc and the user community (via TechNet, FMPug, the FileMaker community on Twitter, and so on). And from what I've been seeing, demand for FileMaker services seems greater than ever.

But something else has changed over the past few years, something that those of us who have been developing with FileMaker for awhile used to have to deal with all of the time: The constant struggle to explain what FileMaker is, to dispel the negative myths about it, and to try hard to convince people that they should give it a chance.

You remember, don't you? The meetings with other IT professionals who, at the first mention of FileMaker, would cross their arms and go on and on about how terrible FileMaker was, how it couldn't possibly do what needed to be done...

I don't know about you, but I find myself fighting those battles, and meeting that type of resistance, a lot less frequently these days. In fact, I find that many of the same people who used to be closed-minded about FileMaker are now approaching me about how they might use it. They're looking for ways to get more done, get it done quickly, to manage more data, and to fulfill more of their users' requests. And with all of the good press that FileMaker Inc has been getting from things like Bento, FileMaker Go, and of course, FileMaker Pro, it's little wonder that people are taking another look at it.

Somewhere along the line, FileMaker got the respect that it deserves.

We've come a long way baby!