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.

Learn how to interact with files on your Mac from within FileMaker. Actually, just grab the functions from this demo and start doing it. No learning required!

One of the primary tools we have available to us when designing user interfaces is color. Adding some categorization to your data using a little color can make it much more approachable and usable. The technique presented here will give you (on Mac OS X) a polished and robust Color Picker with no other requirements than a custom function and a global field. You can even set the default colors displayed on the Color Picker.

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.

Passing values between FileMaker and AppleScript can be a pain. Sure, you can use a named field and table in FileMaker to do this, but if you (or someone else) ever changes either of the names your AppleScript routine breaks. So, even though its not the most efficient way to do things, for short routines I often prefer to use FIleMaker’s ability to run a "Calculated AppleScript" (i.e., compile and run a script from a calculated text).

Other than efficiency, one problem with this approach is that you need to convert data into an AppleScript expression. This custom function makes it a simple task to pass a values list from FileMaker to an AppleScript subroutine: