Super Hi Res Monitor

I spent a rather dumb amount of time recently trying to get my MacBook Pro to display more than 1920x1440 on my external 27" monitor. At that resolution, I'm just not taking very good advantage of the size of the monitor. In FileMaker (and other apps) having the higher resolution allows you to deal with multiple windows and palette windows more effectively.

It turned out that my monitor simply wasn't capable of displaying anything higher than that resolution.

I decided to get rid of my old monitor and purchased an Asus monitor capable of displaying 2560x1440. It was a little expensive, but now I'm really enjoying the additional screen real estate, particularly in FileMaker when I'm using the debugger and data viewer.

-- John Newhoff

Linked Web Browser Page in FileMaker Web Viewers

Web viewers extend the capabilities of FileMaker by letting your database interact with the web. Recently we added a simple web viewer to E-Com, our special education software for FileMaker, that displays a web page with recent news and events. We wanted the users to be able to click on a link within the web viewer and see the linked page in a window in their web browser outside of FileMaker. It sounds simple, but turned out to be a 'gotcha' because FileMaker's default behavior is that  all interaction with the web page happen within the web viewer in FileMaker. There is no preference to open links in a new windows. 

The simple fix to this issue is to use a bit of HTML, using the 'target="_blank”' syntax to allow the link to open up in a new window.

In the demo file, we have a web viewer object set up that will perform a search for the given product in different search engines.

The web viewer is using the  'target=“_blank”'syntax so that clicking on each link will open up a new browser window, leaving the web viewer object intact.

Download Demo File

The Drive to Ke’e Beach

Your correspondent, coming to you from the back of a minivan ( a grand caravan to be precise), reports to you on a drive from Poipu beach to Ke'e beach on the island of Kaua’i. Yes, I'm on Kaua’i for 10 days, apologies to those of you suffering from the recent snow in Seattle.

I've never been to Kaua’i, so this 1.5 hr drive is my first chance to see much of the island. Friends I'm with have been coming here since they were 6, so the trip is full of exclamations of 'hey, I stayed in that condo there when I was twelve' or 'look, that's where my sister Adrienne was stung by a jellyfish'.

In Kapaa now and we’re driving by the remains of the Cocoa Palms resort, destroyed by hurricane Iniki in 1992 and not restored or torn down to this day. It’s a very odd scene as you drive by.

Leaving Kapaa, the sun is starting to reflect on the mountains to the east and the mountain range called 'sleeping giant'. Quite beautiful.

Jurassic Park was filmed partially on Kaua’i, and so traveling around the island is in some ways a tour of of the film. We did a tough 10 mile hike out to the Na Pali coast from Koke’e state park yesterday where it turns it some of the first scenes in the first movie were filmed. Yesterday we drove by a very large meadow where the scenes of the herds of dinosaurs running were filmed, and just now we passed a turnoff to the house that was used for the park visitors center. None of this was intentional. 

We just passed a big rooster on the side of the road. Kaua’i is literally overrun with chickens that have escaped into the wild or descended from original wild Polynesian stock. We even saw some miles into the Na Pali coast backcountry.

Passing through the countryside near Kilauea (of lighthouse fame I'm told), the van has broken out into a Don Ho song, a somewhat frequent occurrence.  This time, it was 'Beautiful Kaua’i '.  More chickens on the roadside.

I've been in Kaua’i for five days now and I still haven't had a shaved ice.

Now driving out of Princeville and a very pretty view down into fields of Taro and other crops growing in Hanalei Valley.

Rounding the corner to our first view of Hanalei Bay, the car breaks out into song again. This time its 'Bali Hai' from the musical South Pacific, which was of course filmed right here in Hanalei Bay. So were scenes from the recent George Clooney film, The Descendants. We drove along the shore road and found the beach cottage where they filmed the scene where George Clooney's character confronts his nemesis.

Past Hanalei Bay the road narrows quickly and becomes twisty and turny and in a short time we're at Ke'e beach and our destination- the trailhead for the Kalalau trail. Ahead: 8 mile round trip hike up the Na Pali coast to the Hankapiai Falls.

 --John Newhoff

March/April Newsletter

The March/April edition of the newsletter is now available for non-subscribers. We discuss "Pause of Error," a recent developer's conference in Portland; introduce our new programmer, Joe Ranne; and highlight creating launcher files in 4D.

Insert From URL

We’ve recently been working on a project for a company in Seattle that you'll all be familiar with -- Space Needle. Yes, it's a company, as well as a large pointy building. Space Needle runs the eponymously named structure, as well as the Chihuly Garden of Glass nearby.

Working with the folks at Space Needle, we are developing an iPad FileMaker Go application for their managers to use to document the status of the grounds, staffing, service, etc., so that they can have objective information about their overall quality of service over time.

One of the pieces of data to be gathered is the weather conditions each day. In order to standardize how this data is gathered, we decided to try and obtain it from an internet source. 

A little research at the Programmable Web turned up Weather Underground as a good-looking option. They have an extensive API for obtaining weather data, and one of their weather reporting stations is only a few blocks away from the Space Needle.

Utilizing the Insert From URL script step introduced in FileMaker 12, we created a button that allows the manager to insert the current weather. The data returned from the Weather Underground API is in JSON, which is fairly easily parsed. The API returns a lot of data, from which we parsed out the sky conditions and the high/low temps.

Upon further discussion with our client, it turned out that a button to capture the current weather was not necessarily ideal, since the weather can vary considerably through the day. We looked back at the data available from Weather Underground, and in addition to current conditions, they have an API call for getting weather history, so we may choose now to standardize on capturing the daily weather observation at a consistent time of day, rather than whenever the manager happens to click the weather button.

The Insert From URL script step is a powerful new feature in FileMaker Pro 12.