Subtitles of the Movie

Over my two-decade career in FileMaker, I've seen tons of solutions. I've seen good solutions, bad solution, mediocre solutions, you name it, I've seen it. And what I want to do is outline some of the problems I've seen with the interfaces. I've seen a lot of them. I'm not the best interface designer but I certainly know when I see a good one. So the first thing I want to cover is abuse of color. The human mind can only handle a handful of colors. You don't want to put more than that on there, otherwise it loses its effectiveness. It may look pretty but it really doesn't do you any good. And you'll see here, you may thing I'm not using enough color here. We will add more color as we go along, but we're using color for purpose. We want to use it wisely. We want to attract people with color so they're attracted up to this area seeing that that's the Form View and then they'll naturally see these next to it. If we put color somewhere, we want to make sure we want to attract them to that. It might be on a button. You know, maybe it's a button for email or something like that. But you also want to be aware that there's also other colors here. There's black, gray and white. These are neutral colors but colors nonetheless and the reason we're using them is that you don't want to overwhelm a person. Nice blacks and grays and whites are easy on the eyes. You can see them and then the colors really stand out. But use other things. Use things like bolding. Use things like three dimensions. We did a shadow here right there. We did an engraving here. We did some indentation here. You'll give flavor a different way other than just using color. Think of many ways to do it and use them and be consistent with them. When you're consistent like we are with the fields, then people will notice that these are fields. In fact, the only white thing on this layout is the field. It's clear that's where you do the data entry. And it's important to be consistent. Have the same lines on every single one. Make sure everything's lined up. Make sure everything is organized properly. I can't tell you how much difference it makes in a solution. If you open up Microsoft Word or Microsoft Excel or look at any of the dialogs in FileMaker Pro, everything's perfectly lined up. Everything's perfectly even. All the spacing is correct. It's just all perfect. That's because the interface should be perfect. And you should do the same with your interface. If you want it to look professional for people to accept what you're doing and say wow, that's a great job, if they can't get past the interface, then it doesn't matter how good the engine is. It's like when you're buying a car. The first thing you notice is how shiny and red it is. Then you go wow, I wonder if it has a good engine. But if it's not shiny and red, then you don't want to buy it. Same thing with the house. If somebody hasn't kept their lawn up and, you know, there's weeds all over the garden, you don't even want to walk into the house. So you want to have your interface, the first thing people see, to be perfect. Line things up. Put the spacing just perfect between each field. Make sure this is all lined; just spend the time doing it. It'll really make a big difference. People will notice it. In fact, I usually say 50 percent of your work is in the interface and it's not just the way it looks. It's also when you click a button, what dialog comes up. Is it worded correctly? But there's a lot of stuff in the interface that you spend most of your time on. Spend a ton of time on this. I find through my two decades that that's the place that people don't spend time on and you don't have to be world-class designer and be able to make gradients and things like that. Just lining things up will be enough. So what I typically do is I make myself a template to start my project. So what I'm going to do is start you off with one of my templates. We're going to go over here and show this window. This is the blue file. You'll find it in the Work Files. It's blue.fp7 and this is a template that I use. It's very simple. It's actually the simplified version but there's a lot of stuff in here and when you go to the Help section, if you don't remember the password because there is a password on this one, you can open up with the guest account and you'll see the password right here. Here's the account and there's the password. So again, if you launch this blue off of the Work Files, then it comes up and says what's the password. Just log in as guest, come over to help, oh yeah, and then you'll be able to get into everywhere here. You'll have a sample form view, a sample list view, a sample find. You'll have all the stuff ready to go so you can just create your solution with this as a starting point. In fact, if you go into ScriptMaker, you'll see a bunch of scripts in here. You have an open and close, allow user abort, log, zoom, hide, even a find. There's a complete find script in here. You're going to have find in every single database. Why not add it into your templates so you can start from there? All kinds of things are in here. There's all kinds of fields. You have creation date, modification date, creation time, it goes on and on and on down here. You even have check boxes and radio buttons and things like that. You even have a pop-up menu. There's so much stuff going on here that I can't really describe it all but anything you might use in most of your solutions should be in here. You can have tons of stuff in here and yours might not be exactly like mine but you can get some ideas from here. Go into this, look at it, get some ideas from it and if you like it, well, then you can use this one. If you don't like it, design your own. You just need to make sure your development is as efficient as possible. Why create all these fields every single time? Why create all these layouts? Have a template, duplicate it and then start adding all the unique stuff that'll be in that solution.