Elemental is my first foray into the product world which is why the blog has been quiet recently. In this article I talk a bit about what Elemental is, what I hope it will become, and some of the cool stuff that is in this first version, enjoy!

Recursion can be a complex and often intimidating part of development. In this article Daniel gives examples and explains what recursion is, and then presents an alternative approach to writing them which is more clear and readable, through using local variables...

Viewing Microsoft Office files directly in FileMaker has always been a real headache for developers, until now. In this article we demonstrate how to easily use Microsoft Offices online app viewer tool to view your office documents directly in FileMaker. We also talk about Google's similar offering, and how files can be easily placed online for viewing using the file.io service.

Building Simple and Reusable Modal Dialogs: "modal dialogs" force the user to make a decision before proceeding — effectively locking down access to the app until the user has made their choice. In this article Daniel presents another approach to designing and programming a modal dialog that is both easy, effective, and reusable...

A breadcrumb menu is a really useful navigation design pattern for both websites and applications. In this article we present a quick and easy means to produce really beautiful breadcrumb menus using a tab control object in FileMaker...

Building a multilingual solution can seem a daunting task, but in this article we provide a framework for building your own solution that can be easily translated into however many languages you require...

In this article I introduce a technique to implement native swipe gestures in all directions for FileMaker Go that can be used to trigger a script upon these gestures. The focus here is implementing a swipe-down gesture to dismiss a drawer menu that slides up from the bottom of screen...

In this article we cover how to build a beautiful sliding drawer menu that works on both FileMaker Pro and FileMaker Go. The menu looks and feels exactly like any other sliding menu built in any other development platform. FileMaker Go is where it really shines, providing a user experience no different to if they were using a drawer on any other native app.

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!).