FileMaker have a new member of the family — FileMaker Cloud. But what is it exactly and what does it mean for you? 

FileMaker Asia Pacific put on a 2 day "Developer Days" event, providing a great forum for local developers to gather and exchange ideas, plus hear from some the FileMaker team themselves on both product and market strategies... 5 members of Team DF made it along...

If background images are used sensibly, they can provide a beautiful backdrop to areas of your solution, such as a login screen, splash screen, or indeed the entire solution. FileMaker allows the user stretch the window both horizontally and vertically in any ratio they wish. Anchoring has allowed us to try and compensate for this in our designs, but often images suffer because they are themselves a fixed aspect ratio, and deviating from that ratio will either stretch and distort the image if 'maintain aspect ratio' is off, otherwise result in blank space around the image edge if aspect ratio is on - both options are not ideal for a background image.

In this article we present a technique that allows you to resize an image and have it re-generate a thumbnail version upon resizing of the layout. This thumbnail version is a cropped version of the original, but respects the original image's aspect ratio.  If you choose your image sensibly, you can make a layout background that looks great no matter what dimensions your window is set to.

Search is an integral part of any solution, and can take many forms. FileMaker provides us with a useful native find mode, along with quickfind. Often though this is unintuitive for users, or just does not fit in with the design of a solution. In this article we present a slick, great looking search box UI design pattern, and explain how it is built. We also incorporate a number of native FileMaker techniques to achieve this (no plugins here!).

Before turning up at the FileMaker DevCon, Kris decided he'd fit in a bit of worldly travel that's seen him end up covered in mud at Glastonbury then enjoying a "summer" tour with Contiki around the UK in the middle of political and sporting crisis... how much fun could it all be?