A Mouse-Over in FileMaker?

A VERY COOL example of outside the box thinking from Daniel Wood of Digital Fusion:

The slide control is an exciting new  layout tool introduced in FileMaker 13. Because of it’s primary function of sliding via a swipe, it is built with FileMaker Go in mind. However it is quickly finding it’s place in FileMaker Pro with a number of cool uses for it being introduced into the community.

The slide control is one of the first UI tools that has animation built into it. The action of moving from one slide control panel to another can be animated (or not animated) by way of script. We can also script the navigation between slide panels. For these two reasons the slide control becomes a good candidate for a number of other UI patterns, one of which is a sliding drawer…

I wanted to take this one step further however and remove the need for the user clicking a button to initiate the drawer expanding – wouldn’t it be cool if you could just put your mouse over the draw to initiate it, similar to the web?

Wait a minute, did you say mouse-over?

Yes that is correct. The mere act of placing your mouse cursor over the panel will expand it. So how is this possible? FileMaker has no native mouse-over functionality, and in order to expand and collapse the drawer we obviously have to run a script. So how can we initiate a script based on where the mouse is?

He outlines the whole process (including a sample file for download) and even discusses the shortcomings in depth.  I was using a mouse-over plugin recently and found the mouse-over feature to really nice–for a while.  But anytime the mouse got near the trigger object, it toggled open or closed. After a while we just disabled it due to mouse-over fatigue.  Still, this type of creative thinking is always a positive sign for the FileMaker community, and will lead to more creative programming.  Well done, Daniel!  Be sure to follow the link to learn how he did it.

More…A Sliding Drawer that Opens and Closes on Mouse-Over.

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