SharpFM a FileMaker Developer Tool

One thing that FileMaker makes difficult, is sharing your work without sharing the whole FileMaker file. Sharing table schema, scripts, calculations, custom functions, etc is all difficult without sharing the complete .fmp12 file which often includes data and other file specific objects.

SharpFM is a utility to make it easy to save these FileMaker objects outside of a FileMaker app.

FileMaker allows you to copy/paste all of these objects from one file to another if you have both files open in the same copy of FileMaker. SharpFM is able to tap into this behavior to allow us to save those objects as raw XML. Essentially tapping into the Clipboard API to receive those objects and convert the raw binary data to XML that can be saved anywhere. In other words, you can't copy a FileMaker script and paste it into Notepad, but you can paste it into SharpFM! Same with tables, layouts, script steps and full scripts. Copy from FileMaker, paste into SharpFM. Then you can do the reverse too, copy from SharpFM and paste into FileMaker!

Once you have pasted the object into SharpFM, it stores them in a folder you select. From there you can save, share, and edit the XML files and then use SharpFM to copy the raw XML back into the same, or a different FileMaker file.

You can download it from GitHub: https://github.com/fuzzzerd/SharpFM. Go to Releases and download the latest version.

Feedback is welcome! If you use it, find it interesting, have a question, or want to contribute big fixes or enhancements, please create an issue so we can discuss how to get it done.

How I make Strawberry Italian Ice

Summer is hot. I like sweets. I derived my recipe from an ancient older Chicago Tribune article.

Ingredients

  • 1 cup sugar
  • 1 cup water
  • 20 strawberries (substitute a similar volume of your favorite fruit)
  • 6 cups ice cubes

Directions

The first step is to make our fruit sugar mixture:

  1. Dice fruit into small pieces.
  2. Make simple syrup: Mix 1 cup sugar and 1 cup water, boil until sugar is dissolved.
  3. Mix 1 cup of hot simple syrup with diced fruit.
  4. Allow to cool, and refrigerate overnight.

Note: this simple syrup recipe leaves a little extra for other uses.

The second step is to make italian ice:

  1. Pour the fruit and sugar mixture over 6 cups of ice. Blend with a powerful blender until smooth.

You can eat it right away, but it can be a little runny after being in the blender. I put it into a freezer safe container for an hour or two before serving. If frozen overnight, it may need to thaw for a few minutes before serving.

Shortcut

If you have simple syrup already and don't want to wait, simply throw 1 cup of simple syrup, fruit, and 6 cups ice into blender.

Enjoy

Eat it quick.

Scaling the UI in Thunderbird, including messages list et al.

I use a lot of software on a lot of devices. Sometimes the defaults just don't work for me. Thunderbird is a great mail application, but using it on Ubuntu with a high dpi screen, the messages list was tiny.

There is an advanced setting that allows you to scale the UI, but was difficult to find how to actually change it. This old support forum explains how to do it in an older version, and this Super User post gets you close.

The bottom line is that you need to get to the Configuration Editor. to edit

layout.css.devPixelsPerPx

The default value was -1.0, but its a scaling setting that you can dial in to get the exact size you want. For my situation, 2.25 seems to work well, but the change is immediate so you can quickly get a sense of what's going to work for you.