PauseOnError rocks Berlin!

berlin1I’d have difficulty imagining a conference that could have gone much better. Egbert Friedrich was a super host, very kind, gracious and made sure we were all welcome in Berlin. Talks were exactly what you’d have hoped to see. Almost all were a bit chaotic and loads of audience participation. Everyone wants to do this again.

Berlin2Hotel was in a super location right on the bank of the River Spree, in the former East Berlin. There are several sections of the wall right by the patio area along the river. Previously this was right in front of the wall.

Sessions that stick out for me:

Yann Liquer-Solizo

Did a superb presentation on using the grid system for FileMaker layouts. When I say presentation it was very much in the Pause style, loads of questions and discussion. This ran for three hours rather than the scheduled one and a half hours. Would have gone longer, but we were getting quite thirsty so it moved to the hotel bar. Probably the best talk I’ve ever seen on FileMaker user interface.

His FileMaker tool for calculating grids is available for download at http://www.infografix.eu/gridmaker/

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Simple Interfaces

Was really struck by this and what it should be telling us about our interfaces:

Everyone in our profession knows that building a good user interface is maddeningly difficult. The discovery, in the early Web browsers, that reasonably-typeset text which embedded simple forms and hyperlinks, and came equipped with a “Back” button, hit the biggest 80/20 point ever in the history of User Interfaces, couldn’t have been predicted by anybody; but it’s as true today as ever.

– Tim Bray here

In Action: Zulu iCal Server for FileMaker

Check out this short video of editing your FileMaker records from within iCal:

Zulu is a collaboration between SeedCode and 360Works. The beta for Zulu is underway; if you have a project that could deploy Zulu now, please get in touch.

Zulu: Sample File

Getting closer to launching Zulu, our iCal Server Plugin for FileMaker. The sample file is almost done. Tried to get the “story” out right on the home screen: see your records in FileMaker, see them in iCal, work with them on your iPhone…

New Mod of the Schedule View

Todd Geist (amazing FileMaker developer, recently back in the game after winding down a startup) has just finished a great modification of the Pro Calendar for one of his customers. He’s got a short video showing it off here:

Demo of Todds' mods to the Schedule View