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Saturday, August 30, 2003

Keeping Up With Software

I am drowning in my curiosity. I attempt to keep somewhat informed on a lot of different software especially in my areas of interest. This involves lots of time to download and fool around with freeware, shareware, and demo versions of commercial software. The only sane way I have found to even attempt keeping up with more than a handful of applications is by using VersionTracker.

VersionTracker: Mac OS X Software has by far the best free access to see updates and download latest versions. The above link is for OSX software, but they also track updates for Windows, Mac OS9 , and Palm software. I also subscribe to their Pro service which allows comparison of the version on your hard disk with the most recent version and a direct link to the download. With the pro version you can add many items to a download shopping cart to be downloaded all at once rather than waiting for each.

Happy Labor Day!

Sunday, August 10, 2003

Email Archiving in FileMaker pro.

I discovered eMessage Archiver 4.01 on VersionTracker today. eMessage Archiver 4.01 - VersionTracker:
I am still checking it out, but this shareware solution looks like it is worth a look if you are interested in archiving your email. It was written by retired generalist in science, philosophy, and practical thinking named John Carlson. He originally built this system for his own use using AppleScript and HyperCard but has translated it to a very versatile system that allows archiving or just backup. You can select to archive based on message date, priority, and or folder settings.

Thursday, July 31, 2003

Leveraging Capabilities To Help The World

I was recently asked by a business associate (my financial advisor) for advice on how to get more business. Thought you might be interested in my answer.

"Leverage your value to others!"

Today as in years past people are more comfortable with word of mouth referrals than in doing the hard work of interviewing and comparing competing product or service offerings.

So what would make me more likely to bring up your name to friends and acquaintances when the opportunity arises?

I know you do a lot better job of keeping up with the market and investment options than any of us .... After all it is your full time job. How can you leverage your value to provide more service to each of us?

I suggest putting more effort into leveraging your value. You can do this by producing a written opinion/fact piece that you can distribute to those who have email addresses or internet access. I can either choose to read or ignore a distributed distillation of your knowledge when I have time without making an appointment. With this one effort you can have an efficient meeting with many minds at once and I would feel like I am getting more benefit from your hard work without taking much more of my time in meetings. You demonstrate your knowledge well when talking to any of your clients during an appointment, but each appointment takes up a major portion of your day and you cannot possible talk to each of us in a meaningful way more than once per month if your client base is large or if we are too busy. But if you were to produce an email summary of your current opinions on a weekly/biweekly or at least monthly basis...we could read and digest at our leisure.

Of course there are potential legal liabilities of putting things in print, but if you are digesting information from other sources with proper permission and attribution you may be able to limit your liability and we will appreciate your filtering - so we don't have to do so much reading and filtering on our own.

How will the above get you more referals? Your apparent value to each client would be more visible to each and it would be easy to forward such an email or web link to a friend in support of my opinion of how great a job you are doing.

I am experimenting with ways that I can add particular clients to leverage my own capabilities to provide greater service to humanity. I have not yet taken this much beyond the idea phase, but I am on the lookout for clients with grand ideas that have the chance of improving vast numbers of lives etc. I think I can vastly improve the capabilities of the right client. I can help them to leverage the skills of a few to service the multitudes using a networked database like FileMaker Pro. This perhaps is a bit arrogant of me, but I think it is a good direction to take. When I get some time to follow my own advice and put some more of my thoughts in print I may see some progress in this direction.

You can set up a weblog similar to this for yourself for free in about 10 minutes. You do not need to know html or any technology, you just have to have access to the web and some great ideas to publish.

If you forward this article to a friend, please include my link....Saving The World With FileMaker

Saturday, July 26, 2003

Announcing a FileMaker interface to your iTunes Library

I am looking for an improvement on my "Saving the World with FileMaker" title. It is a little outrageous and perhaps has some unintended religious connotation. I want to focus the ideas I post here on the good things that can be done with FileMaker so I want the title of my blog to strongly reflect that feeling.

Speaking of helping improve the world. Wouldn't it be nice to find, view and play your itunes from FileMaker? If you are a FMPRO 6 user and a Macintosh user please download this template and tell me what you think of it. You will need to manually export your iTunes library to an xml text file (from the iTunes menu) Then this template will import your library text and allow you to filter and play any song.

iTunes FileMaker Interface Download

Cheers,

Joel

VersionTracker: Mac OS X Software

VersionTracker: Mac OS X Software

If you need to keep up to date on software I highly recommend a frequent visit to VersionTracker. They have lists of software for Mac/MacOSX/Palm/Windows and make it easy to find a product and current versions.

I subscribe to their service as well which adds a local utility application that periodically scans my hard drive and lists my version with the currently available versions and allows one click downloading or adding to a shopping cart for multiiple downloads.

I highly recommend it!

Cheers,

Joel

FileMaker WebRing: hub

WebRing: hub

The FileMaker Webring has links to sites of FileMaker Developers as well as to mine. A good place to browse in search of a consultant.

Cheers,
Joel

BLOGGER

Check this out if you want to start your own weblog.....BLOGGER

A man is like a fraction whose numerator is what he is and whose denominator is what he thinks of himself. The larger the denominator the smaller the fraction. - Tolstoy

Saturday, July 19, 2003

Recent excuses

No posts for a while due to my trip out to Missouri to visit a school system client. I am getting a little too busy and this this web log is not as high a priority as family time and client time (both of which have been fully booked of late).

I will get back up to speed on web logging as time allows.

Cheers,
Joel Bowers

Friday, June 27, 2003

World Peace, World Health, World Wealth

The automatic ads at the top of my weblog keep picking up advertisments for other database developers but I would like them to lead to world health, world peace, and philanthropic organizations. Evidently too much of my content has mentioned my database platform of choice which is picking up the wrong kind of ads.

If anyone knows what drives the adds and how to sway them in favor of "Saving the World" please drop me a line
jmbaworld@jmba.com

Once and Future Posts

This software allows me to draft a post before publishing it. So this one may seem a little late in appearing (after it's creation date).

I have set a goal to keep publishing to this web log until I get too busy doing the kind of work that I love. So if you see that this site has become stale.. just bear with me and come back in a few months. I will most likely have finished the project and have reverted to posting more frequently here.

Of course you can email me but if you are not in my address book there is a slight chance your message will get thrown out with the spam. Don't you just love the power of the spam polluters to make email less reliable?
jmbaworld@jmba.com


Cheers,
Joel

Tuesday, June 24, 2003

Web Log Technology

If you are interested in easily publishing to the web (the way this web log is created) Check out Blogger Site

Sunday, June 22, 2003

Education to fit a modern world.

A "Saving the world with FileMaker Pro" project proposed by Joel M.Bowers & Associates

Assumptions
The premise or underlying assumption for this project is that the world will be a better place if we can educate more of it's inhabitants in more subjects. I think it should be possible to remove the limits on adult education which often require physical presence of the student, fixed schedules based on instructor availability and cost per student based on classroom space limitations.

Summary
I am proposing to develop a way to meter out educational or informational material in a way that fits with widely varying schedules and conflicting personal priorities. This development project will require a grant to support the effort and some content or content provider to help with the initial testing and implementation of a trial of the newly designed system.

The concept in short is to provide a user controlled delivery of course content via email and website coordination. The goal is to provide some sort of user biased deadline/pressure for continuing to study but allowing a lot of flexibility to accommodate the fact that people have other priorities that tend to "get in the way". In theory, a series of email reminders and motivational messages would attempt to remind those falling behind to get back on course but allow individual based course delivery speed and completion schedule.

The content would allow for piecemeal delivery and some feedback mechanism to insure that content was received and digested before delivering some or each sequel.

Student Controls

The student should be able to control...
Study material per session (pages, reading minutes, homework minute goals)
How frequently to schedule sessions (nominal) coupled with
Course completion goal
Obtain the next session immediately upon completion of the previous session.
Choice from a wide variety of content
Cost control choices
Tuition free courses with the sponsorship or included advertising
Advertising free material by paying prorated costs
Etc.


Seeking interested parties

If you are interested in helping with this project please contact me at jmba@jmba.com.

Friday, June 20, 2003

Solving World Problems with FileMaker Pro

What are some of the BIG ISSUE problems of today? Perhaps:

Illiteracy
Hunger
Poverty
Terrorism
Ethnic Hatred
Overcrowding
Homeless
Disease
Environmental Problems


How might FileMaker be used to help solve or aid solution of some of these problems?

FileMaker is excels at efficient information exchange. Can information and better communication help? You bet! In some of these cases, communication can help to find a solution. Defining a problem and getting people to agree to work toward a solution is often the most important obstacle in the approach toward a solution.

What do I mean by information exchange? Much of the world has historically been run by bottlenecked or limited systems. One person, one office, one on one communication were often big parts of our political and social systems. I thing we are making a little progress toward making these systems more efficient, the web has done a lot to "open" some of these systems, but I believe more can be done by introducing database informations systems with appropriate business rules.

More later....

Leveraging my FileMaker Developer Skills to Solve World Problems.

I had a great idea today! I want to leverage my skills with database constructions and automation (using FileMaker - ). I have some great clients and work on a wide variety of new projects with a wide variety of new clients each year. Wouldn't it be great if I could lend more of my skills to the kinds of organizations that "Make a Difference"?

One of my most "Make a Difference" clients right now is FIRST. FIRST is an acronym for Fostering Interest and Recogition of Science and Technology. The organization founded by Dean Kamen with the help of some industry and educational mogels, runs a series of regional competitions and an annual championship for highschool robotics teams. They unveil a new game each year and the teams have to use similar components to build custom robots optimized for winning the yearly game. This year I was proud that FileMaker, Inc. contributed a copy of FileMaker Pro to each of the teams. I helped build the scoring system used at the 20 + regional events and got to help score using "my" system at the championship event at Reliant Stadium in Huston, Tx.

I hope to have time to add to these notes and make this a more interesting blogger site, but for today, this is it!


"Saving the world with FileMaker Pro" project proposed by and all rights reserved by Joel M.Bowers & Associates.