Have Phone, Will Travel

Last year I took an extended trip to Latin America, a dream I had for a long time. As my husband and I prepared for our adventure, we considered what to do with our cell phone plans. We didn’t want to continue to pay the AT&T bill while we were abroad, so we looked into having our iPhones unlocked by AT&T, which turned out to be incredibly easy. I didn’t want to lose my existing cell phone number entirely so I opted to have the phone number ported to Google Voice, for a one-time fee of $20. With my number in Google Voice, I downloaded the Google Hangouts app, where I could send and receive texts and phone calls from my existing phone number. This works out really well to maintain that phone number without having to have an actual cell phone plan tied to it. Once the phones were unlocked and we began our journey south, we were able to purchase SIM cards in each country we visited. It typically went like this. We entered a country and in the first few days we would ask the locals about which provider had the best cell phone service. In South America, there are two pretty big competitors, Claro and Movistar, but there are others depending on which country you are in. When we decided on a provider, we would inquire where we could buy a SIM card. It was always an adventure trying to determine where to purchase the SIM card. In Nicaragua, we were sent to about 5 different stores before finding the right office. After purchasing the card, typically for around one dollar, we would visit a corner store where they would be able to load our cards with money so we could use the phone. In all of the countries we visited, the cell phone companies offered very cheap promotions when reloading a card. In Colombia, there was a promotion where you could have two chosen numbers and when you called either of these numbers, the first five minutes of the call was free. Making local calls, texting and surfing the web were quite cheap. I usually put a few dollars on my phone at a time and that was enough to get by for a few weeks. Any time I wanted to call the States, I would use the Google Hangouts app. With Google Voice, it is free to make phone calls to the United States and Canada. The process of finding, purchasing, and setting up the cell phones was a little tedious at times, but I happen to enjoy this kind of travel - where I get to interact with locals, force myself to learn the language, and learn about something I typically would not. So for me, the adventure of using an international cell phone was part of the fun. Plus I didn’t have to give up my existing phone number when I left the country. It was a win-win! ~Kate Waldhauser

And Now for Something Completely Different

Yes, it’s true. I had design work in a 4th Dimension database to do, and testing in a FileMaker one. There were end user questions to handle. But it was a beautiful, cool, misty fall day.

What wouldn't I do for that face?So, after answering the queries (we try to get to them in a timely fashion, even when the outdoors beckons), the dog and I jumped in the car and headed out to an off-leash dog park in Everett that has winding trails through acres of woods.

Post mud discoveryAs it happens, there is also a pond. And mud. Far be it from Tully to avoid either. What with the wooded trails, the undergrowth, the logs, the pond, imaginary squirrels to chase (I’ve never seen one inside the fence), and a few other dogs to chase through the underbrush, I now have an exhausted pup sleeping away the afternoon. Hurray!

There was also beautiful fall foliage, moss, bracket fungus, asters, large firs and pines, and all the other wonders of the Pacific Northwest in autumn.

Now I guess I need to get back to that 4D design work...

Note: This is an off-leash dog park (Loganberry Lane). Please obey your local leash laws.

~Alanna

Removing White Space From Text Fields

Removing white space in text fields is nothing new for FileMaker, but removing extra space before carriage returns ( “¶” for short ) from a delimited list, requires a little bit more than the simple trim function that is provided in FileMaker.

The trim function in FileMaker will remove unneeded spaces at the beginning and end of a text string. This is very helpful for a single line of text. It will take a line of text like
" Bob " and turn it into "Bob".

Unfortunately when you have several lines of text that are delimited by a ¶ character as in the following example, you will need something else.

example:

"Allison¶
Bob ¶
Charlie¶
Doug"

If you want to make sure none of the lines have an extra space at the end like the second line "Bob ¶", a simple trim will not work.

This is where the substitute function can come in handy. 

Substitute(text;searchString;replaceString)

The Substitute Function will search for a character or string and replace it with whatever character or string you choose. With this you can take a text field like the example above and use the substitute function to replace the occurrences of " ¶" with a single "¶".

 Substitute ( example ; " ¶" ; "¶" );
(notice there is a space before the ¶ in the searchString)

This will provide you with the corrected:

"Allison¶
Bob¶
Charlie¶
Doug"

You can apply the same substitute several times to remove multiple spaces, and when mixed with the trim function, it can really help clean up text and lists.

Substitute is one of my favorite functions for working with text. If you haven't used it before, give it a try and see if it can't help remove unwanted white space.

 -Xandon

Modular FileMaker

FileMaker Pro does not lend itself to modular development practices as easily as some other programming environments, such as Java, Javascript, or C, but we are still very fortunate to have a community-wide development effort towards a library of re-usable code modules at http://www.modularfilemaker.org.

We recently had to update a database for a client to synchronize with Google Contacts using Open Authentication 2.0, and were able to take advantage of an OAuth module uploaded by Jim Randell to save ourselves and our clients a significant amount of development effort.

In our weekly development meeting this morning, we reviewed another new module posted last month. It's a FileMaker WebDirect module that allows for the creation of PDFs, a function not directly supported by WebDirect. I think this is going to be a module we’ll use to enable better reporting functionality in solutions we publish to the web via WebDirect.

If you haven’t looked into Modular FileMaker, you should check it out!
~John Newhoff 

Retaining Object Locations

For those that develop in practically any framework other than FileMaker, retaining object locations is an issue that you’ve really never had to think about, but for FileMaker developers, this is something we have learned to handle over the years. The majority of traditional frameworks use some form of style sheet language to control the basic look and feel of a page, so most objects only need to be defined once. In FileMaker, each layout needs to be specifically designed down to each pixel. Setting a theme can shave a few minutes off the design process, but custom layout objects like navigation bars, icons, and field labels outside of the theme need to be copied and pasted from layout to layout.

Prior to FM12, the only way to copy and paste an object into the exact location from another layout was to make a note of the position in the Inspector before copying the object to another layout. As of FileMaker 12, there’s a new trick: 

• On the current layout, enter Browse mode to commit any changes
• Go back into Layout mode and select the object or objects you want to copy
• Copy the object (Command+C on OSX or Control+C on Windows)
• Navigate to the target layout while in Layout mode
• Enter Browse mode
• Go back into Layout mode again
• Without clicking anywhere on that layout, paste the object onto the layout (Command+V on OSX or Control+V on Windows)

If you accidentally click anywhere on the layout before pasting the object, you can enter browse mode, go back into layout mode, then paste the object and it will retain the location.

That’s it! With all that saved time, you can get in an extra episode of Game of Thrones!
~Joe Ranne