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ATPM 18.04
April 2012

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Agloves Touchscreen Gloves

I have a couple of pairs of the original Agloves and use them both outdoors and indoors. My hands are always swollen and uncomfortable, and almost unusable in any kind of cool or cold weather; but the knit Agloves are easy to put on, very effective hand-warmers, and wonderful with the iPad and the iPod touch. They are one of the few products I have found that more than lived up to the original glowing review.

I am glad to see Agloves reviewed here so that more people can learn about them.

—Jo Morrill

Making The Leap

I was at a friend’s house the other day, marveling at how easy his two-year-old son navigated on his iPad 2, which he bought after I convinced him to buy a 24-inch iMac. That fact that your Mom took to the iPad like a fish to water simply reflects the genius behind the device.

—Grover Watson

Text Parsing With FileMaker

I am wondering if it is possible to trim all of the text in a field (and there will be varying amounts of text/words), everything up to a specific word.

I am trying to help various users around the world to define a path to a picture that will be inserted into their container. So a user inserts a picture (reference only) from a shared Dropbox folder, and now I want other users to be able to insert that same picture by changing the filepath to reflect their personal path to Dropbox. One user may have a filepath of imagewin://C:users/JohnSmith/Dropbox… and another might be imagemac:/Y:/Dropbox… and many other variations on that theme.

I have a calculation field (Image Filepath Set) that uses MiddleWords (Image Filepath Set; 5; 25 ) and that works for everyone who has the first filepath (the same number of folders), but not for anyone else. I just used 25 in the calculation because it was a big number, and I wanted to include all possibilities. Overkill, I know.

I just want something that finds “Dropbox” wherever it occurs, and then deletes everything in front of it. It could delete Dropbox, too, I could build that into the calculation.

Any thoughts?

—Marilou Vander Griend

I’ve never come across a text processing task that FileMaker couldn’t handle. It usually just a matter of breaking the processing down into pieces (as it is in any programming task).

So the first thing you want to do is find the occurrence of “Dropbox” in the filepath string:

$dpPos = Position( $filepath; "Dropbox"; 1; 1 )

You also need to know the length of the string:

$strLen = Length( $filepath )

Next, you want to get everything from the beginning of the occurrence of “Dropbox” to the end of the string:

$subStr = Right( $filepath; $strLen - $dpPos + 1)

Putting this all together in a single calculation:

Let(
  [
    $dpPos = Position( $filepath; "Dropbox"; 1; 1 );
    $strLen = Length( $filepath );
    $subStr = Right( $filepath; $strLen - $dpPos + 1)
  ];

  $subStr
)

Testing this in FileMaker, I got:

Dropbox/image.jpg

for:

imagewin://C:users/JohnSmith/Dropbox/image.jpg

and:

Dropbox/otherimage.jpg

for:

imagemac:/Y:/Dropbox/otherimage.jpg

—Charles Ross

Coping With Mac OS X’s Font Rendering

I’ve done hours of research on this. I like OS X but I regret buying a MacBook Pro because of this font antialiasing issue. I’ve tried all the TinkerTool settings, too. I can’t believe for such a long time there still isn’t a solution to this! I’m not used to not being able to fix a technical problem.

—Kramlin

• • •

We will see retina displays in MacBook Pros within a year. That will be the only solution to this issue.

—Toxxiq

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