fmBrainstorm

Author: Donald L. Merand

fmBrainstorm is based around the idea of a brainstorm meeting. Meeting attendees open up a brainstorm record, and add their ideas, which are input by category. While they're adding ideas, a central computer can optionally project a word cloud of the most popular ideas.

Note that if you want to share this file to more than one computer/iPhone/iPad/etc., you'll have to turn on sharing in FileMaker. To do this, go to File→Sharing→FileMaker Network… and click the “On” radio button where it says “Network Sharing”. You only have to do this from one computer - the other people connect to that computer using File→Open Remote.

**Updated 2014.02.28 ** - I took the original, converted it to FileMaker 12 format, and hacked the "open window" script to simply go to the proper layout without opening a new window. I also went through and increased the font sizes and button targets, and made the layout sizes more conformant to iPad screen sizes.

General Usage

We believe that you should be able to do everything without your hands leaving the keyboard. I designed fmBrainstorm around that philosophy.

• Apple-o - open an existing brainstorm. You can search in the “open” dialog.
• Apple-n - create a new brainstorm
• Apple-Shift-N - create a new brainstorm category
• Apple-j / Apple-k - go to next category/previous category in list (loops around)
• Apple-Shift-} / Apple-Shift-{ - go to next/previous idea in selected category (loops around)
• tab - cycle between fields (shift-tab to go backwards)
• Apple-Shift-E - export a brainstorm outline to the desktop
• Red buttons delete, green buttons create, blue buttons perform actions.
  • Note: When you delete a category, all ideas in that category are deleted as well. When you delete a brainstorm, all of its categories and ideas are deleted.

Word Cloud

To use the word cloud application, you'll need to do a couple of things.

• First, you need to install Processing
• Now, follow the steps outlined below in "Integrating FileMaker and Processing" to make sure your copy of Brainstorm is integrated into Processing.
• Now, open up the brainstorm_tagcloud.pde, which should launch Processing
• Find the part of the code that looks like this:

//SET THIS TO THE TITLE OF THE BRAINSTORM YOU WANT TO USE  
String brainstormTitle = "curriculum course ideas";

• Replace the part in quotes with the title of the brainstorm you want to “cloud” (see note above about naming your brainstorms).
• Now choose Sketch→Run from the menu bar at the top. If everything was set up right, you should see your cloud! At least, you will see a cloud once you start entering categories and ideas.
• If something has gone wrong, Processing will show you the error it's having in the bottom portion of the screen. Call your IT person and tell them about the error.

Integrating FileMaker and Processing

It's nice sometimes to have programmatic access to FileMaker databases, without always having to export/import files. Here's how you do it in Processing using the JDBC connection feature of FileMaker.

1. Open up your FileMaker database.
2. Go to File→Sharing→ODBC/JDBC.
   1. Make sure that ODBC Sharing is turned on.
   2. Make sure that the specific file you want to share allows sharing
3. You'll need your FileMaker installation disk. Mount it (or it's disk image) up, and navigate to the xDBC/JDBC directory.
4. Copy the fmjdbc.jar file you find to /Library/Java/Extensions/fmjbc.jar . This allows you to use FileMaker JDBC access in Java, and Processing, files.

Okay! Your system is now ready to do some integratin'. You can find a sample of how you might do this in the samples/ folder. Also check the visualizations folder to see a more involved example using the fmBrainstorm database.