Well, Now What?

Image via Wikipedia

The startup I was working for in Salt Lake City died last week. It was sad, and disappointing but I learned a lot.  Failure teaches more than success they say. I hope they are right :>)

I am kind of excited to be back on my own.  I like being my own boss and FileMaker decided to ship FileMaker 11 during my first week back on my own. Nice timing! I am not sure what I am going to be doing yet, but I have a few ideas. We will see what comes of the them.

In the meantime here is a brief rundown of some of the stuff I did at my old company. Some of it is pretty cool

We did some very cool stuff at this startup.  Basically we were a hi-end photo printer. The prints we produced were not actually prints they were actual photographs on photo paper. No ink involved!  We could produce anything up to 30 inches wide and however many inches were left on the role.  Here is a video of it in action. Imagine this coming from  a FileMaker Layout.  Pretty fun stuff if you ask me!

I had FileMaker jumping though some pretty cool hoops. Here is a brief run down of some of the neato features.

FileMaker Front End to MySQL Backend 

We were able to use MySQL for all of our data.  The only tables that existed in FileMaker where non data tables for graphics and other programtic needs.  There were definitely some tricks to learn but over all I would say it worked pretty well. One of things I loved was the ability to use PHP on the server to offload some of the processing that would have had to happen in the FileMaker client. The speed improvements were dramatic to say the least.  Sometimes taking  the time for an operation from minutes to less then a second.

Wide Area Network Deployment

Most of the users accessed the system over the internet.  All of the data flowed through FIleMaker Server, so none of the external users needed to install ODBC. The speed was pretty good.  FileMaker searches and displays data pretty quickly over the internet, but scripted process can be very slow.  When it was too slow I offloaded the logic to a php script and that was that.

TouchScreen Interfaces

I didn't have much to do with this as it was nothing more than knowing where to get TouchScreen Imacs. But it was still cool.  We did have to think through the fact that peoples fat fingers would be pushing buttons so everything was VERY BIG.  The entire production facility ran on TouchScreens iMacs running FIleMaker Pro. I have some video of it I will try to put it up soon.

Image Manipulation

I had to do some pretty serious image manipulation in FIleMaker. I turned to ScriptMaster from 360works in combination with ImageMagick to pull most of it off.  When we needed transparent backgrounds, I used ImageMagick to build the final image based on a FileMaker Layout.  Essentially I used the FileMaker layout to provide the coordinates of where all the composite images would go and created the image from scratch. No printing at all.  FileMaker would then send the resulting image to the giant Photo image and tell it to print it!  It was very cool to see a FileMaker layout come out of the printer at 24 x 30 looking sharp.

Bar Code Reading

This was one of the coolest things I did. We took pictures of all the order forms.  Then FileMaker scanned each image looking for a Bar Code.  If it found it it would decode it.  This was totally cool.  Scanning barcodes right out of an image and into FileMaker

Thats enough for now. I will try to put up some more moves and examples from the work I did in Salt Lake soon.  But now I got to go figure out what I want to do with the rest of my life :>)