A new release of our free bBox FileMaker plug-in is now available.

Extend the reach of your Mac OS X-based FileMaker solutions to programs, code libraries, or OS functions that are normally outside your reach, including AppleScript, Shell scripts, Python and Ruby.

Todd Geist and Jon Sindelar are releasing a new product called GoZync. It's essentially a push-pull framework for deploying mobile solutions, especially with FileMaker Go. Here's a recap of their recent presentation at the DIGFM FileMaker developer meetup.

 

This is a bug fix release, primarily for:

• issues with the bBox_Applescript function when using a handler parameter
• improvements and fixes to the demo file.

Plus, some cases where functions might be given extraneous parameters are now handled more gracefully.

Details and download at the usual place: http://www.beezwax.net/download/bbox.

A new version of our free FileMaker plug-in is now available. 

Changes in this version include:

• Ruby function for executing scripts passed as a parameter or via a file path
• Execute shell scripts with the Bash interpreter
• Creation of Python global variables using the bBox_PythonSetVar function
• Execute SQL queries against your FileMaker database

The plug-in is now compiled against the Mac OS 10.5 libraries. The main reason for this change was to allow use of a newer version of Python (2.5.4) for Python related calls. Because of this however, Mac OS 10.4 is no longer supported.

You can download the latest version at http://www.beezwax.net/download/bbox.

A new version of our free FileMaker plug-in is now available. You can download the latest version at http://www.beezwax.net/download/bbox.

 

Changes in this version include:

• New functions for directly compiling and executing Python scripts
• Fix for character encoding issue with Euro character in the bBox_PasteboardGet function
• Fix for Unicode BOM issue on PowerPC based systems

Features already included in bBox since version 0.3d:

• execute shell scripts, with the output returned as the function’s result
• execute AppleScripts within a calculation, with parameters and the return value as the function’s result
• get or set raw clipboard (pasteboard) data
• filter text through grep, the powerful pattern matching command
• return the current time with milliseconds
• sort lines of text (optionally allowing you to specify a column or character range)
• find out what types of data are currently in the clipboard
• get a file path’s attributes, including type (file or directory), creation date, and POSIX permissions

 

A new version of our free FileMaker plug-in is now available. You can download the latest version at http://www.beezwax.net/download/bbox

This version sports the following improvements:

• bBox_AppleScript now uses UTF-16 (2 byte characters) where possible
• bBox_DoShell has improved handling of UTF-8 characters, faster processing of large amount of text
• bBox_PasteboardGet has improved handling of encoding issues, and a new UTF-16 mode
• bBox_DoScript function can now pass a text parameter to the script being called

Today we are making bBox, our toolbox of external functions for FileMaker, freely available to all FileMaker developers. Use it to extend the reach of your FileMaker solutions to resources outside of FileMaker by launching and communicating with other programs, utilizing the powerful commands built-in to Mac OS X, and easily creating, processing, and managing files.