RUCKSACK Texnology

Will Porter's review of Airtable is online now at Macworld: http://www.macworld.com/article/3036505/software/airtable-review-a-drop-dead-easy-relational-database-management-system.html Rucksack TeXnology clients may be very interested in Airtable. It's a relational database management system that has many advantages. It's free to get started (and possibly free to stay with). On computers, it runs in any web browser in pretty much any operating system. On smart phones, at the moment it's available only for iOS devices, but an Android app is in the works and coming soon. How's Airtable compare to FileMaker? FileMaker is a  much  more powerful tool: not just a more powerful RDBMS, but a much more powerful application development system, that is, a more powerful user-interface builder. But surprisingly often, you don't need the user-interface tools that FileMaker provides. You just need to store data for later retrieval. In that case, Airtable may beat the...

I myself didn't completely "get" the navigation layout part at first. In this post I want to clarify a few things about the benefits of this new feature. The new navigation layout part in FileMaker Pro 14 and FileMaker Pro 14 Advanced differs in two significant ways from the header/footer parts we've had since forever (and which we still have in 14): Navigation parts don't zoom Navigation parts don't scroll out of sight Well, it's a little messier than that, in reality. Let me elaborate on the messiness of it first, since the messiness may have some impact on why navigation parts took me a day or two to "get". First potential confusion: objects in navigation parts don't zoom, but they are not completely inflexible. If you grab the edge of the window and make the window wider (I'm not talking about zooming the content, I'm talking about actually enlarging the window) then any objects in a navigation part that are anchored to...

There is a significant mistake in my Macworld review of FileMaker 14 , published yesterday. I spent a fair amount of time getting to know the new navigation layout part and in the process, coming to like it quite a bit. As I said in the review, at first glance, it looks like a duplicate of the header or footer layout part, but it's not. At the end of the relevant paragraph, I wrote this little summary: I expect that FileMaker 14 developers will soon start using the navigation part for UI widgets like buttons, and will leave headers and footers for printed reports. I thought hard about the new navigation part; but I didn't give quite enough thought to how the old layout parts will and will not be affected by the new one. The truth is, you will still want to put column field labels (on a list view layout) in a header part, so that they zoom with the body part. (This would apply to footers as well if you put any objects down there that need to stay aligned with the fields i...

I hesitate even to bring this up, because this is Dangerous Knowledge. When you create a new FileMaker database, FileMaker gives you a default login account, with a default name and password. I wish it didn't and in my opinion, it shouldn't. But it does. So here's what you need to know: Never, ever leave that default account enabled. When would this matter? If the database is stored on your computer and never shared with anybody, keeping the default account enabled means anybody who can get into your computer, can open the database — as developer. Now, this isn't really as big a deal as you might think, because they could do this even if you didn't use the FileMaker default login account. (Hint: Password crackers.) That's one more reason why you need to be careful about the security of your computer. But God forbid the database is hosted on a server that is configured for remote access! In that case, physical access to the server is irrelevant. Any Int...

This post assumes you're using CMAssistant 8.1. Not too many of our licensees have upgraded to 8.1 yet, so I'll make a note where you might need to make adjustments for versions of CMAssistant going back to 6.5 or so. So, here's the problem. You want a list simply of the location names and addresses for a route in your current delivery system. Here's how you do it. 1. Find the route's current deliveries I am assuming you want to get location info for a current  route. There are several ways to do this. Perhaps the easiest way to do it is to start in ROUTES. Find the route you want by name and go to form view. In the Run Dates tab of the details box on the right, click on the go-to-related-records (">") button in the Delivs column for the first row. Note the delivery date. That ought to be the most current delivery set for that route. The run dates tab of the details box in ROUTES (CMAssistant 8.1). This button (circled in the scree...

I spend a lot of time in my FileMaker Pro databases, and I know many of my clients do, too. When you're opening and closing the same databases a dozen times a day, it's nice to have time-saving shortcuts to those files. There are basically two ways to create a shortcut. You can save the file as a "Favorite" inside FileMaker Pro; or you can save it as a shortcut or alias on your operating system desktop. FileMaker "Favorites" To save the file as a Favorite inside FileMaker Pro, first open the database. Then, in FileMaker Pro 13's menu, go to File > Open Favorite > Add Current File to Favorites . From that point on, the file will be in your favorites list and you can open it by using the same "Open Favorite" menu. Favorites are terrifically handy and I encourage you to give them a try. Creating a shortcut/alias on your desktop or in your OS X Dock It's just a little trickier to save the file as an alias on your desktop or ...

In my family, we decided to do Secret Santas this year. My wife and I have three daughters, and the two older daughters got married in the last year, so there are seven of us in the immediate family. We all agree that Christmas is really about something rather more important than shopping or gift-giving, and we agree that keeping it simple is a good idea. So somebody said, How do we do this? Although we're all in Dallas, we weren't together on the day that this decision was made and weren't going to be all together until Christmas day, so writing names on paper and drawing them from a hat wasn't going to be practical. Without thinking, I said I could build a database that would make make the Secret Santa assignments and email them out anonymously. My wife looked at me like I was crazy (which, as it happens, she knows me to be). The first concern she voiced had to do with security. She worried that I was going to know who all the Secret Santas were. I assured here th...

My review of FileMaker 13 is finally live at Macworld.com . Macworld/FileMaker 13 Review This is a big release, as you will see from the review. Should you upgrade? There are two possible answers, the easy one, and the hard one. The easy answer is, yes — yes, you should upgrade. The hard answer is, of course, more nuanced. As a technologist I more or less have to live near the bleeding edge. But for most of you, it may be reasonable for you to ask, Is what we've got now broke? And if it ain't, then don't "fix" it by upgrading. I understand that. Just one reassurance for those already using FileMaker 12: FileMaker 13 uses the same ".fmp12" file format at its predecessor. So if you need to add a seat to your current network, and if you're already using FileMaker 12, then by all means, buy a copy of 13 and throw it into the mix. And if you are still using FileMaker 11 (or earlier) and you've been thinking about upgrading, jumping to 13...

FileMaker 13 was released today (December 2, 2013). There are new versions of all the products in the FileMaker product line: FileMaker Pro and FileMaker Pro Advanced Filemaker Server FileMaker Go for iOS Much more can be found on FileMaker's website . One bit of good news: FileMaker Pro 13 uses .fmp12 file format that was introduced with the previous version, so if you have some computers on your network using a FileMaker 12 database and you need to add a seat, you can buy a copy of FileMaker 13 and just add it to the mix. You won't have to upgrade everybody immediately. But you may want to. I've been working with version 13 for a while as I work on a forthcoming review, and it seems a solid and impressive upgrade. I'll have much more info after my review is released. In the meantime, clients of Rucksack (or Polytrope) who have a question, should feel free to contact me directly.

Late last night (as soon as it became available) I upgraded both my Macs to the latest version of the Mac OS: version 10.9 "Mavericks." I also upgraded FileMaker Pro to 12.0v5, an update that mainly seems to provide better compatibility with the new Mac operating system. Tested some of my existing FileMaker database solutions and everything seems to be working fine. If you do upgrade to Mavericks, be sure to upgrade FileMaker Pro, as well. As for Mavericks itself, it's underwhelming, but that's not a bad thing, especially since it's free. The Notes, Calendar and Contacts apps got facelifts, which they needed. But Notes and Contacts are only slightly improved, while the new Calendar looks like one of the new iOS 7 apps, and I don't mean that as a compliment. I'm okay with "flat," but "flat and shapeless", not so much. I dunno. Maybe I'll switch back to Google Calendar. Tabs in Finder windows? A good idea, I guess. But seriously...