Weetbicks Gone Wild (and portals...)

Introduction

You may have noticed a lack of article postings over the last couple of months, and fewer articles overall this year. Please don't panic for it has not been through laziness or lack of content.

What have I been up to

Next year I am taking 5 months off work at Digital Fusion and heading to Africa where I am riding in the 2013 Tour d'Afrique. This is a 12,000km cycle adventure that sees myself and around 50 other riders wind our way from Cairo to Cape Town. I have been saving for this trip since 2009, registered in 2010 and this year have finally paid for it and began preparing.

Cycling is in my blood and this is definitely my biggest cycling adventure to date. A few years ago I cycled across the USA solo but that pales in comparison to the challenge ahead - but its challenge that is the primary motivator for me and I can't wait!

Cycling for a Cause

As part of my trip I have chosen to fundraise for a great charity in both New Zealand and Australia called The Heart Foundation.

The Heart Foundation is a charity that relies on donations and funding to help sponsor their research into the prevention of heart disease, as well as promoting healthy eating and healthy lifestyles in general.

Please consider making a donation in support of my ride for the heart foundation. Any amount will be greatly appreciated by myself and the foundation and you can be assured your money is going toward helping people to lead better and healthier lives.

You can make a donation through the Weetbicks Gone Wild site here.

How you can follow along

With the help of my colleague Captain 404 (aka Phil Taylor) we have created a website for my trip which you can visit to check out all the info, donate, and keep up to date of preparations, and posts from the road.

I will be taking a small amount of technology with me in the hope that I can post regular updates during the ride along with photos - as internet speed permits! You can check out the site here.

Now, this IS a FileMaker site after all?

You didn't think I would write a whole article and not make any mention of FileMaker did you? Okay here's a quick tip for something that has always bothered me in FileMaker but is now fixable in 12.

Ever create a portal and want to suppress the grey (black on windows) highlight that appears when you click inside a portal row? Normally this is avoidable if your entire portal row is a button, perhaps for selection purposes, but in the case of a regular portal this highlight can be really annoying and detracts from the visual appeal of your portal.

I tried various methods to resolve this and found the following method all but eliminates the default portal row highlight:

1. Place a text object in your portal and resize to to fill the portal row
2. Assign it the 'Exit Script[]' step essentially making it a button
3. Change to the 'Pressed' state, and set the fill to 'none'
4. Set the button at the back of the portal and lock

By removing the pressed visual cue on the button, the end result is from the users standpoint they are not clicking a button at all, rather just a blank space. The button suppresses the portal row highlight from appearing!