FileMaker Pro

Working for...

FileMaker, like working after

all of this.

I wouldn't be a bit surprised.

Before that, I didn't even know marketing automation was a thing.

I had used a combination of FileMaker and Constant Contact in previous jobs.

And the idea that I could... set up an automation that when people clicked on something or opened it, I could send them something else or segment them in a different way that wasn't through spreadsheets and manually sending emails was a total game changer.

My little brain, my little 26 year old brain blew up.

The acquiring company was very familiar with SQL.

And the other company that I was working for had built their entire database off of this tool called FileMaker Pro or something like that.

And the output of the way that you get data was just very kludgy.

And they were having some trouble mapping these fields over to SQL.

I even picked up books on SQL even though I wasn't managing databases.

I just had a desire to understand what are these languages that I'm ultimately going to run across in some fashion.

Or the FileMaker Pro, I think it was called.

I was very curious, what is this built on? Yeah.

Yeah.

And to really push that, the bounds of what that could be used for, 'cause I think that could open up a whole new level of web tools inside FileMaker.

So today we're gonna be talking about using web viewers in FileMaker to do things other than just display a web page.

So the first example is a client that asked us to...

They have field technicians using iPads, and they had three requests.

So the first issue was that they were currently storing the container field as a single field with 17 repetitions.

So every time they asked a developer to add the, have the ability to add more images, the layouts needed to be expanded, or slide panels needed to be expanded to add the additional repetitions.

And FileMaker doesn't really have any native support to allow users to select multiple items to upload into containers, nor the ability to rotate.

Don't get the distractions.

When I first started building e-commerce websites, the first e-commerce website I ever built was on FileMaker Pro, and FileMaker Pro had the ability to be able to publish to the web, and it was a comic website.

It was a customer.

Anyway, you know, you'd always get the checkout and, "And don't forget this, and you might like that-

I built an inventory system in 2003 for a friend who ran a rare book dealership.

FileMaker Pro, a PowerBook G4, and a barcode scanner that plugged into the USB port.

The scanner cost $400.

It beeped when it read a code.

The question about native versus PWA isn't only about what he needs today.

It's about what's interesting to build.

I built the FileMaker system in three weekends.

It ran for eight years.