We had a great time at the booth this year talking with customers and potential customers. One of the session speakers mentioned CNS Menu this year which generated a lot of interest in the plug-in. It is good to see this gem get some exposure. We have had a pretty difficult time trying to explain to people exactly what it is and does. We are known for our SMTPit Pro plug-in, but I actually use CNS Menu more I think.

This year at DevCon, we handed out several goodies, including the 32 page booklet below. We made about 250 of these booklets and quickly ran out. So if you were not able to get one or didn't make it to DevCon it is available both here and on the main CNS blog site. It contains information about our plug-ins including news, new products we have recently announced, and what products we are retiring. It also includes sample code for all our plug-ins as well as a few coupons that expire at the end of the month. Feel free to check it out.

You can also download a much higher resolution PDF. Please enjoy the booklet, and give me any feed back you would like.

While on my recent bookmarklet excursion, I decided to tackle a bookmarklet that I've been wanting to do for a few years now, which is to go to the next search results page in Google.

Turns out it's MUCH easier that I though to accomplish by using the DOM to grab the actual next url:

javascript:location.href=document.getElementById('nn').parentNode;

Since that was so simple, I decided to try going back to a previous resutls page. It was a matter of finding the right div ID:

javascript:location.href=document.getElementById('np').parentNode;

I have only tested these in Safari, so your mileage may vary. I have these as the third and fourth bookmarks on my bookmarks bar, so I can hit command-3 to go to previous, and command-4 to go to the next set of results.

To add these bookmarklets to your browser, simply drag the links below to your bookmarks bar:

• <
• >

For quite a long time now, I've had a bookmarklet in the first position of my bookmarks bar in Safari which will load the web page above whatever page I am currently viewing. This can come in very handy when you land on a page from a search engine and you'd like to see what else might be on the site.

For example, say I am on FileMaker's website looking at documentation at

http://www.filemaker.com/developers/resources/documentation.html

http://www.filemaker.com/developers/resources/

http://www.filemaker.com/developers/

http://www.filemaker.com/

There are times though, when walking through the path is needless because there are no viewable pages available. It just depends on the website. Because of this, I've wanted to find a new bookmarklet that simply goes to the root of the site. After googling for a while, I came up dry, so it was time to write my own. I did find some example bookmarklets that made it easy to figure out at http://jan.moesen.nu/code/browser/bookmarks, specifically the "CD .." bookmarklet.

Turns out it's so simple I don't know why I didn't try to do this earlier:

javascript:location='/';

The code to move up a directory is a little more complex, but not to difficult to follow:

javascript: 
   if (location.pathname == '/'); 
   else if (location.pathname.charAt(location.pathname.length - 1) == '/') location = '..';
   else location = '.';

I have only tested these in Safari, so your mileage may vary. One cool thing is you can use command-# for bookmarks on your toolbar, where # is the number of the bookmark from the left. I've named these " • " and " •• ", and they are the first and second bookmarks on my bookmark bar. So to get to the root of a site, I just hit command-1, and to walk up the directories I hit command-2.

To add these bookmarklets to your browser, simply drag the links below to your bookmarks bar:

• •
• ••

I have recently started building dashboard widgets and have come across a problem I just can't seem to solve. I have researched all the websites and lists that I can think of, and seem to either be alone in the issue, or no one else wants to talk about it.

I am building a web browser widget. I know what you are thinking. "Your a duffus, no one wants a web browser widget". That's probably true, however, I actually do need one, and I'm building it for myself. I have several administrative web pages that I use that would be perfect for a widget. That is, I need to do something on one of these pages, then put it away for later until I need it again. There's really no point in having a normal web browser window open for these pages, and having it at my finger tips to switch to quickly is absolutely idea. That's enough of that.

So here is the problem. Not all of the web pages are the same size. To force a bigger page into a small window would obviously not be ideal. So I built in a resize graphic to resize the window, which works great......until I click a link that is outside of the iframe. Yes, I'm using an iFrame. There's really not another way to do it because I need to allow the web page I'm at to use any CSS or JS files required for the page.

You can download a copy of the dashboard in its current state below. The web pages I need to use are private, so I've used public ones for this version of the widget. As such, they are much bigger pages that what I envision for the final widget.

So to recap the issue. When you load the widget, you can resize the window all day long to whatever size you want - though I do have a minimum width/height set. Once you click on link in the title area, the resize box no longer works, but still appears to be activating. At this point, you can hit cmd-r to reload the widget and you can resize it again. It does not make much sense.

Anyone out there got any ideas on what might be going on?

Download "Dragon Browser"

COMM-UNITY NETWORKING SYSTEMS RELEASES MMEMAIL PREVIEW, A FILEMAKER Email PLUG-IN.

Fort Worth, TX, May 5, 2005 -- Comm-Unity Networking Systems, creators of SMTPit, announce MMEmail Preview, a dialog based FileMaker Pro email plug-in. This Preview Version is only available for Macintosh, a Windows Version will follow very shortly.

Screencasting is becoming more and more popular these days, so I thought I would give it a shot. I have managed to get the quicktime file size down to something that is workable. The only real problem I am having now is the volume of the audio. I will try to address that in future screencasts.

This screencast demonstrates using MMColor and the system color picker. It also shows how to colorize text in a field.

MMColor is a cross platfrom CNS plug-in for FileMaker Pro 7 and later. Though this video was done on the Mac platform, the solution can be used on both Mac and Windows. A download link is provided below.

Please let me know if you have any questions or comments.

The screencast is just over 4 minutes long and 5 mb in size.

• View MMColor Color Picker Screencast ( 5 mb)
• Download the FileMaker file used in the demo ( 8 k)
• Download the MMColor plug-in

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

COMM-UNITY NETWORKING SYSTEMS RELEASES CNS IMAGE 1.0, A FILEMAKER PLUG-IN.

Fort Worth, TX, April 6, 2005 -- Comm-Unity Networking Systems announces the release of CNS Image 1.0, for FileMaker 7.x and above for Macintosh. A Windows version will follow. This is the initial release of the plug-in.

CNS Image can import images into container fields and export images from container fields. What the plug-in can do with images while in FileMaker is where it gets interesting.

This free example demonstrates how to create an extremely flexible audit system to log field changes in your records. The bulk of the work is done through Custom Functions. Once the custom functions are set up, you can add logging to a table easily by creating two or three fields in your table and a layout with the fields that you would like to log. You can track any type of field including repeating fields and container fields.

Features include:

• Uses custom functions to do 99% of the work
• Ability to log repeating fields
• Ability to log container field changes
• Fields can be created in any order
• Log is triggered via a modified timestamp field
• Ability to log related fields or not
• Uses a user defined layout to add/remove fields from logging
• Uses text formatting to aid in readability
• Adds a date banner to the log between different days
• Custom functions include comments
• Includes a white paper explaining how to recreate the example in your own solution
• It's free. ;-)

The example solution can be found in the "Tips" section of the CNS website.

So what if we do not want the user to be able to type into the field? What if we only want the "active text" field to be a drop zone? That is where "Part II" comes in. If you have not already read Part I, you might want to read it first because it explains things more thoroughly.

Read full article...

Using AppleScript to access CURL on OS X makes downloading web content a snap. Note that some web servers, such as Google, do no allow you to download content via CURL because of license issues. (For Google, they would rather you use their SOAP API to download content.)

This simple example downloads a page from the internet and places it into the "result" field. You can also use the "parameters" field to add search terms if needed.

This example only scratches the surface of what you could do. CURL has the ability to download files to your hard drive. Using an auto enter container field based on a path, you could download a graphic from the internet and then automatically import it. CURL also supports other protocols such as FTP and HTTPS. You can easily create a solution to interact with a credit cart service such as Authorize.net to charge credit cards directly in your FileMaker database. (Using their AIM method)

For more information on CURL, check out http://curl.haxx.se/. You can also view the man page from the terminal using "man curl"

Download the example file (FileMaker 7 and OS X required )

Below is a script I worked up so that I could easily resize photos for my photography section. It uses the Big Cat Script Plugin by Ranchero Software. (Also home to NetNewsWire)

I've been looking for quite a while for an EASY way to turn AppleScript code into HTML. After scouring the net, about the only solution I've found worth even talking about is "Convert Script to Markup Code" available at http://homepage.mac.com/jonn8/as/

Simply put, if you need to post an AppleScript on the net, use this application. It also supports the AppleScript protocol so that a user can simply click on a link to have the AppleScript open in the Script Editor.