FileMaker DevCon Review 2015
This year, the FileMaker Developers Conference was in Las Vegas, Nevada. Having never been to Las Vegas I was looking forward to seeing the city – needless to say, the view from the hotel was pretty amazing.
Day One
This is my second DevCon, my first was in San Diego in 2013. My co-worker and I arrived Monday July 20th. We checked into the hotel and arrived at orientation to get our passes – which went very smoothly. Monday night we were treated to a cocktail hour for Canadians where we met the FileMaker employees for our region.
I will briefly discuss my favourite session for each of the following days.
Day Two
On Tuesday, I went to a session called “Introduction to Server-Side Scripting” by Greg Lane (from Skeleton Key). He discusses how to properly use server-side scripts to significantly enhance performance as well as how to test if the solution has access to a server to run the script – which would be useful when using mobile with varied network.
Day Three
On Wednesday, I attended “Web Services in FileMaker” by Salvatore Colangelo (from Goya). This was definitely the most entertaining demo for me as he used littleBits electronics hardware to do sound volume recognition using IFTTT and a web service to display data on FileMaker from a loud noise (he used a clap), and after 4 loud noises the data would make a physical flag wave.
Day Four
Thursday had two very good sessions. The first session “Creating and Scanning Barcodes with FileMaker” by Ryan Klenk (from MainSpring) goes into great detail about types of barcodes, various ways to create barcodes, as well as scanning hardware (iPhone and Bluetooth). The second, “Advanced Mapping with the Google Maps v3 API” by Aaron Giard (from The Scarpetta Group, Inc.) was a very popular session where he used the FMP protocol to interact with the Google maps API to bring up a FileMaker related record, based on a Google maps pin click. I would advise anyone planning on using the Google maps API to look into the licensing and if it will fit the needs for your solution. All in all it was a very good DevCon and I look forward to my next one. Next year’s DevCon is back in Las Vegas at the Cosmopolitan.
If you want to share any of your favourite DevCon 2015 moments, feel free to leave a comment below.
For a full list of the FileMaker DevCon Speakers, check out the DevCon 2015 Website.
Thanks for Reading!
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