Jeff England's Blog

Filemaker Go, check Orientation

jeffengland — Sat, 06 Nov 2010 03:41:23 +0000

I attended my first Filemaker user group the other night. One of the questions that came up was how do I check the screen orientation on the iPad. I came up with a quick little solution, not the most elegant but it works.

Layout anchors work great and make our filemaker layout resize to the orientation of our device. So then why do we need to be able to discover the orientation of our device? Lets take a simple checklist iPad app as an example in portrait mode, the ipad’s interface resembles a clipboard.

However if a user turns the device to landscape there is no reason to waste that newly acquired horizontal space. Most apps have an entirely different interface to enhance the user experience. If only layout anchors are used, we as developers, are missing out on a very big UI opportunity.

Below is a link to an example file which helps determine the orientation in filemaker. (Hint Get ( WindowContentWidth ) )

http://nebsfunworld.com/images/uploads/orientation.fp7_.zip

sorry its not a .fp7, having an issue with the site.

Live Interaction With Bowling Lane

jeffengland — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 20:02:51 +0000

In my last post I showed off my user interface, but did not show how the solution interacted with the bowling lane. This next video shows just that! Hope you all like it and in my next few posts I’ll show how I can turn on a bowling lane remotely (management station), and how I interact with my other filemaker solutions.

Thanks for watching!

** Disclaimer!**

I talk a little faster and stumbled a bit more in this one because I had to commentate on stuff that I had already recorded and I had forgotten the order I had done things.

Filemaker Go

jeffengland — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 22:59:13 +0000

Filemaker has finally re-entered the mobile OS market, this time with the iOS platform. We couldn’t happier. We need a mobile solution for turning on bowling lanes, POS etc, and a mobile version of Filemaker is just what we needed. I haven’t had alot of time to develop on this platform yet, but I was able to put together a little interface for our front desk module. What you see below is a layout in list view, and each record represents a bowling lane. If the record is green that means that lane is currently in use. Pretty soon we’ll be able to turn on/off bowling lanes amongst other options. Thanks Filemaker!

40 Lanes Completed

jeffengland — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 22:33:21 +0000

Its been a crazy summer for us at Neb’s Fun World not only are we installing the new scoring, but we also have redone all the flooring and seating. Phew finally a break just making my way out to devcon and now have 40 lanes of scoring completed. Should have the rest of the center (12 more lanes) done about a week after Filemaker Devcon. Our network has been easily handled the load and filemaker for the most part has worked without any hiccups. Really excited to be finishing up installation, So far customers have bowled 30,000 + games of bowling in this short period of time!

Lanes 45 – 52 operational

jeffengland — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 18:30:59 +0000

It’s been a while since I’ve last updated this blog but I’ve been busy setting up the last eight lanes of bowling. It is now official at Neb’s fun world the scoring is now run using my solution I created in filemaker pro.

Paying customers are now using the scoring and will try to post videos and keep my project status up to date on here.

get Internal/External IP address

jeffengland — Tue, 04 May 2010 23:52:40 +0000

To communicate from the front desk module to the bowling lane, I needed to find out the lanes IP address. I created a applescript that finds out the clients local and external IP address and puts both values into a global field. Finding out the computers IP address is specifically important for solutions using remote triggering of scripts, in particular 360 works remoteScripter.

to getInOutIP()

set the_interface to 0

repeat

set ip_internal to “”

try

set ip_internal to do shell script (“ipconfig getifaddr en” & the_interface)

end try

if ip_internal is not “” then exit repeat

set the_interface to the_interface + 1

if the_interface = 5 then

set ip_internal to ” unknown “

exit repeat

end if

end repeat

try

set ip_external to word -7 of (do shell script “curl http://checkip.dyndns.org”)

if ip_external = “” then set ip_external to ” unknown “

on error

set ip_external to ” unknown “

end try

tell application “FileMaker Pro Advanced”

activate

set the contents of field “gIPaddress” of the current record to ip_internal & “_” & ip_external

end tell

return {Inside:ip_internal, Outside:ip_external}

end getInOutIP

set IPA to getInOutIP()

Filemaker 11 Certified!!!

jeffengland — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 02:50:51 +0000

Somewhat unrelated to my development project here at Neb’s Fun World, but I’m very happy to announce that I am now Filemaker 11 certified!

Mobile Bowling Solution

jeffengland — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 21:50:41 +0000

As described in earlier posts, we have a front desk/management station that we use to turn on bowling lanes. This has been the norm since the inception of bowling. However with the new technologies coming out this year, and in particular the apple iPad, we are finally be handed tools to think different.

With the apple iPad we are finally able to have a mobile front desk. We will be able to turn on bowling lanes, make a score correction, add bowlers, and turn on TV’s anywhere in the building. This kind of freedom is particularly important for us because our facility is 2.5 acres indoors. This kind of change to our bowling industry is huge. The traditional check in counter could theoretically be rendered obsolete. What could take its place is a restaurant style check in, where bowlers would “wait to be seated”. The employee could walk the bowlers to their lane and accept payment. Probably the most important part of this new method is the square footage it saves!

Unfortunately I’m Canadian and have to wait a few more weeks than our American cousins to start developing this mobile solution. I’ll be posting my progress, so keep on following.

User Interface Demo

jeffengland — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 18:25:05 +0000

Below is a video of my bowling interface. Keep in mind that this interface is designed to be used in a touch environment. Under normal conditions this filemaker file would be full screen, however it was easier to compose this demo if I left it out of full screen mode.

Quick Application Switching

jeffengland — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 19:14:22 +0000

While developing our suite of applications, there was a consistent problem. How was the user going to be able to quickly switch from application to application? Our solution, integrate a dock at the bottom of the layout. Watch the video below for more details.