New in FileMaker 14 is the automatic “reconnect to server” feature which I particularly love. But there are some catches to getting it to work nicely, and things you can do to make the most of it.  In this article we cover it in depth and outline some limitations and possible workarounds.

This is the first time we have ever reviewed a product, and may be the last. The fact is we just love Developer Assistant so much that we had to write about it.  We'll cover some of the major features of Developer Assistant and why we think this should be in every developers toolkit.

Four years ago we wrote an article about how you can refresh portals and relationships without the need to flush the entire cache. The technique involved using a Cartesian Join. Now, over four years later FileMaker 14 has given us a supported way to do this with the Refresh Portal script step.  In this article we demonstrate how the step can be used by comparing it to the example given in our first article on the subject. We also cover some situations where cartesian join may still be the preferred method of refresh.

In FileMaker 14 you have more control over object styles than ever before. In this article we document some of the main new formatting and styling options for layout objects

In this article we show how you can build a button bar to become the main navigation bar for your solution, and how it can be abstracted as much as possible so it can be pasted across multiple layouts.  We also cover some of the limitations that using a button bar will present.

The biggest feature overhaul in FileMaker 14 is that to the scripting area, now known as the script workspace. This is the biggest scripting change in years and with it comes a number of areas where you can gain in efficiency when writing scripts. In this article we document all of the areas of the script workspace and list as many features as we can find.

Placeholder text is a great new feature in FileMaker 14. With it you can specify by calculation what label text is to appear in a field that is empty. You can also have complete control over the styling of that text.  In this article we demonstrate how to setup a placeholder and some of its benefits over standard labels.  We also show how placeholder text can be used as a powerful user interface tool for displaying virtually any calculated value direct on a layout without the need for fields or variables.

We are pleased to announce that FileMaker have today released version 14 of their software for desktop and iOS.

We are all incredibly excited by this release. It brings some new features that the developers have wanted/needed and we can see areas where we can further enhance your solutions. FileMaker WebDirect and FileMaker Go make some big leaps forward and both products are starting to ‘mature’ really nicely.