If you are using a FileMaker Pro database and want to continue doing so, don’t forget to check that your version of FileMaker Pro is compatible before you upgrade to OS X Yosemite or any other version of OS X above your current version. Here is the URL from filemaker.com.
As of 9:15 am, OS X Yosemite is not listed on FileMaker.com’s Compatibility web page. I hope to see Yosemite added to this list within 24 hours of the official Yosemite release — probably sooner. So check this page before upgrading.
If your current version of FileMaker Pro is not listed at all, you’ll want to wait longer and investigate filemaker forums and other means to determine the safety of using Yosemite.
Not the official word from FileMaker Inc. but MIT Information & Technology Knowledge base says the OSX Yosemite Gold Master 3 was OK for FileMaker Pro 13 but not for FileMaker Server 13 when I looked at it today.
If you have been reading along in this series I’m doing on inter application communications from FileMaker Go, you know that this stuff is far from rocket science. I would love it if readers contribute their ideas and knowledge on communicating with other interesting iOS apps. Here’s part 3. I am already in love with the capacity to deploy Google Earth in my Knowledger database.
Example: my People table in Knowledger mostly contains people I want to know more about like famous people in history and current luminaries of interest. Today I added Marko Ahtisaari who has been the lead designer at Nokia.
Google Earth
When I added Marko, I also entered his birthplace which happens to be one of the design capitals of the world: Helsinki, Finland. It was obvious that there should be a way to quickly get more information about Helsinki.
I just recently saw this week that the Google Earth app on iPad and iPhone shows Wikipedia entries for whatever place it is showing. That did it. I needed to add Google Earth as an app resource to Filemaker Go. I researched URL Schemes for Google Earth on iOS and I found documentation that said all you can do is open the app, you can’t send it parameters to tell it what to search for. Not impressive but I created a script that copies the birthplace to the clipboard and then opens the Google Earth app with Open URL:
That means I can paste in the birthplace once I am in Google Earth and can avoid typing.
Google Maps
But Google Maps, takes search parameters in its URL Scheme and it happens to have a link to Google Earth in its menu on iPad and iPhone. So this is a better option for my needs I think.
A single Open URL button step gets you there without the copy paste:
FileMaker Go has great PDF functionality. Since the iPad came out, I’ve been liking PDFs more than ever because you can do so much with them. You can annotate them and sign them. It’s great.
As I mentioned in my last post, the FileMaker Go app I’m working on has a URLs table. In that previous post I explain how to invoke the Chrome app on your iOS device to open URLs. Here I want to show you how to user PDFConverter to convert a URL to a PDF. All this for the $3.99 price of the PDFConverter app for iPad or $2.99 for the iPhone app if you don’t already have one or the other or both. PDFConverter will also convert lots of other things to PDF format.
What I like best is to be able to convert a web page to a PDF so I can annotate and store that PDF locally. Then I can read at my leisure even if offline.
The PDFConverter App
Here we go. Once PDFConverter is installed on your iPad, iPhone or iPod touch, you can type in “pdf” in front of the http url on the webpage you are on in Safari to invoke PDFConverter.
Creating your PDF Converter Button with Open URL Script Step
To run this with a button in FileMaker Go, you just do like I showed you last week. Use the Substitute command like this in your Open URL script step you assign to a button:
Substitute ( URLs::URL ; “http” ; “pdfhttp” )
Here it is in Button Setup:
“FileMaker Button setup dialog”
Anyone with FileMaker Pro 12 can do this. When you click the button, you get this:
Click the Convert button at the top right to create the PDF. Then open your shiny new PDF in your PDF app of choice. I’m fond of PDF Expert myself.
There is more to come in FileMaker Go. You can’t save to FileMaker Go’s directory from another iOS app — yet! And I’m hoping we’ll get a way to access PDFs on Dropbox. It must be coming because FileMaker PDFs are wonderful and need to be easy to suck directly into FileMaker Go – on the fly.
FileMaker Pro and PDFs
In the meantime, you will probably be doing some of your PDF importing from FileMaker Pro where a two-finger tap in the container field (on Mac) will give you the option to import PDF (if you’ve got your container field set as interactive). You can import a bunch of PDFs quickly this way where they will then be available on iPad and iPhone in FileMaker Go. This works really well when you’ve got your FileMaker file hosted somewhere like I do at my home (office).
Otherwise those not indulging in FileMaker Pro (an indulgence I highly recommend), you’ll need to move your new PDFs into FileMaker’s iPad or iPhone directory via iTunes. Once in the filemaker directory on your iPad or iPhone, you can import those PDFs at will from FileMaker Go.
Wikipedia Entries as PDFs
I see that the Wikipedia web site will create PDFs for you for any particular entry. They also have a book option in which you can add multiple PDFs. It takes a few seconds for the PDF to first be generated. At that point, you can download that PDF. If you are on a PC or Mac, you could then move that PDF into your FileMaker database.
Opening URLs with Chrome App on an iPhone screenshot
I’ve been working on a knowledge app in FileMaker Pro and Go lately. I keep track of interesting and favorite people, places and things there. My favorite part is collecting interesting people. People like Thomas Jefferson, Jony Ive, or someone in the news. Whoever I am interested in. I read about Edward Snowden today and thought he would be a good person to learn more about so I added him to my app.
I also track URLs that relate to those people, places and things as I find particularly good ones. Today I had trouble opening a couple URLs I found using the Open URL command in FileMaker Go. I thought it might be because the URLs were a little unusual. One URL had an asp extension. When I had another URL not work, I started thinking.
I suspected that Safari or Chrome would open them. It’s actually hard to find the iOS URL scheme to make Safari open a URL in FileMaker. I bet I can find one, but meantime, I knew Chrome has documentation on their URL scheme since they want apps to use Chrome on iOS. So, I Googled to find the information and it was a little spotty but I was able to piece it together after a few tries.
The Open URL in Chrome Tip. Normally, when you want FileMaker’s internal browser to Open URL, you might put in a URL like this one: https://filemakerfever.com. To get FileMaker to invoke Chrome app to open the URL directly instead, use the Substitute command:
Open URL [ Substitute(URLs::URL,”http”,”googlechrome”) ]
Here are a few extra details to make sure it works for you:
Make sure that Chrome is installed on your iOS device
This won’t work on Mac/PC with Filemaker Pro – but there may be a different way for that. Install this button or put this in a script meant for FileMaker Go use.
In this example i have a URLs table and a field called URL which is holding a normal URL
That’s about it. If I were to release this feature in an app for sale, I would either need to:
Specify that the user has to have Chrome installed in the documentation or
Do a test to see if Chrome is installed or,
Create a preference that says, “I want to use Chrome to open URLs” instead of FileMaker’s browser.
All right. This is the kind of tip I love best. Short, sweet and something I can use in lots of places. That’s why it was worth spending some time a Peet’s on Father’s Day to figure it out. Probably my favorite two areas of development these days are interapplication communication and taking advantage of the plethora of good stuff on the web in some way. This tip does both!
If you are using a FileMaker Pro database and want to continue doing so, don’t forget to check that your version of FileMaker Pro is compatible before you upgrade to OS X Yosemite or any other version of OS X above your current version. Here is the URL from filemaker.com.
If you have been reading along in this series I’m doing on inter application communications from FileMaker Go, you know that this stuff is far from rocket science. I would love it if readers contribute their ideas and knowledge on communicating with other interesting iOS apps. Here’s part 3. I am already in love with the capacity to deploy Google Earth in my Knowledger database.
