Hotting Up FileMaker

For many years, FileMaker was somewhat of a 'closed shop' when it came to extending it’s capabilities. If we ever wanted to do anything "outside the box" (basically cool stuff) we really had to blur the lines of what FileMaker intended. (Which we certainly did with our Reactor plugin!)

However with FileMaker 19 Claris opened up FileMaker with “add ons” and JavaScript support, which means the development community can now extend the capabilities of FileMaker in some very cool, very powerful ways.

So we got to work, or in particular Daniel and Steve got to work, and we’ve come up with three new developer products — one is an add-on, the other a tool for crafting nicer interfaces, and the third a module for change logging.

All are designed to make both the developers life easier, and provide a nicer experience for your end users, whether they’re sitting at their desks using FileMaker Pro, out in the field using FileMaker Go, or anywhere using FileMaker WebDirect.

So to give you a brief rundown of the three products:

elemental_ux

elemental_ux is a design resource that helps developers build better looking user interfaces. Think of this as an image gallery. Somewhere you can go to access awesome avatars, icons, gradients and much more. It’s our attempt at giving developers the tools to take the ordinary to the extraordinary in design of FileMaker Databases.

elemental_log

Possibly the most mundane of the three, but easily the most important and business critical: elemental_log is data change logging toolset that embeds in your solution and tracks every field change in every table that you ask it to. This provides a complete audit log of who’s changed which data, when, and what values it’s gone from and too. 

Log has been built to be as easy to use and set up as possible, with much attention paid to the design and the configuration. The joy of this is that there are very few steps required to get it up and running.

elemental_dropzone

Last but not least, our latest offering is from an amazing combo of Daniel and Steve…

elemental_dropzone is about to make your lives 110% easier, by giving you the ability to drag and drop multiple files and folders directly into your FileMaker solutions in a single go.

Not only does this work on FileMaker Pro, it also works on FileMaker Go and FileMaker WebDirect. This means if you are working on an iPad out in the field, you can add things like photos, signatures, documents, directly out of folders and right into your solution all at once without needing to add one file at a time.

And for your convenience, fellow developers, we’ve released this as a FileMaker Add-on, so it's always going to be there in your layout tools, ready to drop into any layout where it’s required.

To learn more about our elemental products, visit our dedicated website at:

elemental-fm.com