Comments on: Make the Status Toolbar Work for You

By: Frank

Frank — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 03:43:45 +0000

I find the new status tool bar a BIG disappointment! It is only half baked. If I upgrade to FM10, then I have to redesign all my layouts. Filemaker should have given developers the option to keep the status bar on the left side or the top. This way we could slowly integrate the new design into older layouts. Furthermore, we should the ability to add custom buttons with scripts to the status bar. Makes more real estate available in the layout.

By: Hans J. Gunnarsson

Hans J. Gunnarsson — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 21:17:34 +0000

For deployment of solutions this is not totally bad. But a great number of the windows I create are to narrow to make any use of the new position.

And during development while creating customized solutions I’d rather prefer a floating palette a la Word and Omnigraffle. It is about time that FMI delivers a unified UI for FM Advanced.

By: Jon Rosen

Jon Rosen — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 19:22:35 +0000

You are correct that through custom menus we can prevent damage from use of buttons on the status bar. It’s still close to useless, in my opinion. I wish that FMI left it alone until they were ready to deploy useful changes. It’s user-definable, so the developer can’t even present a consistent view. The new record selector uses up a lot of space and is less elegant than the old “rolodex” style selector. The only thing I might want to use it for in its current incarnation is for report printing (Continue button), but I might switch to a different approach. I consider this feature change a total failure until FMI does a lot more work on it.

By: Piers Dunkley

Piers Dunkley — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 23:12:32 +0000

When I first opened FM 10 I was completely lost without the status area.
I clicked the icon to open it and nothing happened, or didn’t appear to happen. And then I raised my eyes. And there it was.
Much better than the old one , and with the tips you have given, much mire flexible

By: Denis

Denis — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 14:43:00 +0000

Geoff, This is a wonderful tip on how to rename some of the Status Toolbar buttons and tie them into the scripted functionality we want.

The Toolbar is a tremendous move in the right direction but is still only half-baked because it can not be fully modified and gives developers only half of what they have been looking for in terms of a more standard, thus more familiar, centralized way to manage the look, feel, and operation of a database. Your steps give me some hope on how to redefine my current development style but I still find myself hindered rather than empowered as a developer. Nonetheless, keep up the great work!

By: Geoff Coffey

Geoff Coffey — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 15:28:09 +0000

Stephen:

My vague recollection is that this dialog box only shows if the user has permission to edit the layout, so it may not be as bad as it seems. I will test this and report back.

Geoff

By: Stephen Dolenski

Stephen Dolenski — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 10:11:04 +0000

Thank you Geoff for your article. Another note to be aware of is now that the view menu (form; list; table) is as you say “front and center” it makes it more critical to disable views on that layout you don’t intend the user to switch, when pressed in a multi-user environment you are presented with a dialog box “Do you wish to save this change with the layout?”

If the user chooses YES then the setting will be set be accepted as the layout’s default view – and instantly cause all other users currently on that layout to have their screens update to reflect this new setting, if they are in the process of editing a record as soon as they exit it will update.

The layout default should be a check box in the layout setup and the dialog box should be eliminated, it’s a pity there isn’t a trigger that can execute your script on view change, then developers could use the handy buttons instead of adding their own on layouts.