FileMaker Pro 12: Beginner Tutorials
Introduction / New FileMaker 12 Layout
Subtitles of the Movie (FileMaker Pro 12: Beginner / Introduction / New FileMaker 12 Layout)
There are so many New Layout Features it's going to be impossible to show them all in a brief overview. I'm going to select just the best features and highlight them and we'll save the rest of them for when we're going through the tutorials and show them when they make sense for what we're doing at that time. So these New Features will show up all throughout beginner, intermediate and advanced. Most of them will show up in the beginner but you will see a few that make sense to be shown in later tutorials. So we're going to show off these New Layout Features by using a Starter Solution. I'm going to use a Contacts and we'll just save it on the desktop and you can see what we have is a beautiful New Starter Solution and it uses one of the New Layout Themes in FileMaker 12. Now these are not like the themes we had before, these are truly themes that will change whenever you want. In other words if you chose a theme in previous versions it would be that theme and you would have to make a new layout if you wanted a different theme. These ones will change whenever you want, they're really great so let's show them off. If we go to Layout Mode, then we go up to Layouts Menu and choose Change Theme, whether this is a Starter Solution or one you created from scratch because you will get asked if you create a new layout what kind of theme you want to use. You just come in here, you change it, you go oh you know what let's find out what I like. Okay. I'm on Semi-Rounded, maybe I want another Semi-Rounded Beach or maybe I want a Rounded which would be Cosmos maybe. Or maybe I want to go into this area, Rectangular and go to Bamboo, I mean there's all different kinds of choices here. I'm going to choose Onyx here because it looks very different, you'll see it changes everything on this entire layout. It's all been updated, this is really cool and makes it very easy for you to design a really good looking solution very quickly. Now one of my other favorite features are the Guides and you can see them here in blue and if you go through the different layouts, you'll see that they will have the Guides as well but not necessarily in the same place. That's because you can have Guides on, different Guides on different layouts but you can have the same Guide on different layouts as well. So let's show how they work, if we go ahead and drag in from here or in from here we can get ourself a Guide and then we can decide, well what do we want to do with that guide? Do we want to go ahead and lock it so it doesn't move it or do we want to also show it on all layouts? And so now you see it's a, kind of fuchsia color here. We move to another layout, you see it's there so you can line things up across multiple layouts, it's really a great feature. Not only that we have Guides which replace the T Squares which is much better. We now have Dynamic Guides, this is really, really cool. Let me go ahead and show you based on this, if we grab something, watch what happens. These Dynamic Guides are just flipping all over the place. they allow you to line up with the center of an object, with an edge of an object. You see how all these things work here? You also get this Dynamic Location Indicator, really fantastic stuff so you don't have to go into let's say, Inspector and use a more complicated feature to line things up, such as the position or whatever it might be. So those are great features, I love them, in fact when you're resizing, it also does some great things. You get the feedback but also tells you, is this the size of another object? You now know that, that field is the size of those labels over there and so when we get over here. We can see when it gets to the size of these and then we're done. Didn't need to select all of them and, and then go ahead and use the position, Tab to go ahead and figure out whether they're aligned or not. It's very, very intuitive, very easy, so you can do one button clicking. You don't have to go back and forth between the Inspector. I'll still use the Inspector but this makes it very easy. You also have to realize there is also Relative Resizing, so if we get multiple objects selected, you'll notice that they have one selection rectangle. You also notice the New Knobs. You have a, a know that will allow you to select and change the size just in this one area but notice that what's happening here. We are changing this relative, if you did this with the previous version of FileMaker, you'd be, get a big mess. All the things are resized in weird ways, now they resize relatively to each other. It's really, really helpful, you can take a job that's maybe 15 minutes long and change it down to 30 seconds literally with this feature. You also notice that there's new badges here, if we go ahead and View and Show our Buttons, we'll see we have a new badge for the button here and we also have new badges that will show up in the upper right-hand corner, that means that there is a Script Trigger running in the layout. So there's all kinds of cool things going on here to give you better feedback. You also have your Stencils, love these, if you pop this menu down, you can choose to Show a Stencil for, let's say the iPhone. And you can choose to show the same one for an iPhone in landscape and now you can design on our computer for that size screen. In fact you can put any kind of stencil in there, you can put a custom size if you want or, or for another computer. It's, it's something I used to use another program for separately to do this and now it's in FileMaker it's great. And one last thing I'll show you and this is by no means even close to covering all the features. If you click on a Field, come over here and come into Appearance Section, you notice that you have States. You have the Normal State, the In Focus State, the Hover State and the Pressed State. You notice that this gradient that they're applying here and that's another new feature changes just a little bit on each one of these, so let's see what it does. I'll go back to Browse Mode and you'll see when I hover over it, it changes the color of that and you may not be able to see this when I click into it, it also changes the color yet again. So really great feedback in these features for Browse Mode with that hover, I really love it and I hope you enjoy all of the Layout Features that have been added as we go through the rest of the tutorials.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | FileMaker Pro 12: Beginner |
| Author: | John Mark Osborne |
| SKU: | 34323 |
| ISBN: | 978-1-61866-046-6 |
| Release Date: | 2012-06-08 |
| Duration: | 16 hrs / 169 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
VTC Sign up & Benefits
- Unlimited Access
- 81,350 Video Tutorials (14,200 free)
- Video Available as Flash or QuickTime
- Over 715 Courses
- $30 for One Month Access
- Multi-User Discounts Available
