Subtitles of the Movie

In the previous tutorial, the beginner tutorial, we created a fully-functional contact manager. It's got a lot of features in it that would satisfy most users. We've got, uh, a pretty good interface, you can see we've added blue and yellow and blue down here. We have a tab control feature, which you can click through and see all the different sections and put more information into a smaller area. We also have buttons. You can see we have a button that goes from list view to form view and we have a variety of buttons here that do a string of script steps so it's easier for the user to use this system. We even have buttons to navigate through the different records and we've recreated a portion of the status area with calculations so that you could see that information and save the space that is lost down there. You can see all the space down here is unused. We can put it in a much smaller space and gain all this screen real estate. So it's a very capable system, but it's not quite like the example at the beginning of the beginner tutorial. So let's take a look at that again and we'll go over here and show that. Here's the invoicing solution we show. And if we go over to the contact manager, we can see how nice the interface is. In fact, across the customers and the invoice and the products, everything is really nicely put together. All these graphics you see can't be done with the FileMaker drawing tools; not even with the engraving and embossing options. These have to be done in another graphics program like Photoshop or whatever you like and then copied and pasted or imported in here. So what we're going to do over the next couple of sections through this entire chapter is demonstrate how to put these graphics in here. We're not going to necessarily show how to create them. You have to watch a tutorial on Photoshop or some other drawing program, but we're going to show how you can, once you've created them, pull them in here. In fact, we're even going to give you the graphics we're using here so you can use them in your own solution if you want. And there's a lot of details that you need to know about creating them. So we're going to go over those in the following sections throughout this whole chapter and make the contact manager look much closer to this. In fact, as we go on through the rest of the tutorial, we're going to go on to making the invoicing solution, but for right now, we're gong to stick with the contact manager and show you how to create that nice-looking, 3-D look that we have here.