In the first of a two part series, we begin the search for a faster way to perform aggregates in FileMaker. We cover why aggregates can be quite a costly operation - especially on wide area networks - and use that as a jumping off point for finding a faster method…

In the final part of this two part series, we cover the technique introduced in part one in more detail. We also carry out a number of tests and present the results. We also try to address some of the limitations of this technique and ways in which you could try to work around these…

I can't think of a better escape than a trip San Diego in middle of the New Zealand winter, which is exactly what Daniel and I did a couple of weeks ago as we headed off to the annual FileMaker Developer Conference (DevCon) - an annual geek fest in a nice warm place.

By day, Steve is a database developer, quietly dealing to some of our most tricky database integrations, but by night, under the cover of darkness he's banging out some very sexy iPhone/iPad apps. His latest creation is "Canterbury Earthquakes".

For a long time I was a bit of a Doubting Thomas when it came to the online accounting package cleverly named Xero. Well, I’m here to say I’m a convert. We love Xero!

We think those Aussies are kind of the same as us.... don’t be fooled they are most definitely not!

In part one, we built a basic navigation bar made from repeating fields. In this followup article we take the formatting of the navigation bar further by introducing highlights. We also adjust the construction of the navigation, and introduce a custom menu implementation that can be used in conjunction with, or in place of the navigation bar…

When FileMaker sorts records it happens on the client machine. Consequently, sorting can be a very painful process for users over a slow connection to a database. In this article we show a very fast way in which records can be presented to the user in descending creation order, without sorting delays...

For a long time I was a bit of a doubting Thomas when it came to the online accounting package cleverly named “Xero”. I thought it was a good idea and was pretty impressed by what the NZ company based in Wellington were undertaking. But I guess I thought the product was still too immature to cover the full gambit of functionality required to replace our incumbent system (MoneyWorks) and be a useful business tool

In this article the term "self-aware window" refers to a FileMaker window that can know in real-time whether or not it is the currently selected window, and act accordingly. We introduce a technique for allowing windows to know this, and some examples of what windows could do with that knowledge…