Let's review what happened in the year 2024. In total I visited seven of the thirteen FileMaker conferences this year. We run our own Xojo conference in Andernach. And we released six updates to our plugins for FileMaker and Xojo.

January

January started with the development of new 14.0 and 24.0 plugins, a lot of blog posts advertising for the conferences.

FileMaker Magazine

Matt Petrowsky surprised us once more with a new video about our plugin. You find more of them in the playlist on YouTube.

February

Claris Engage

Once again I flew to Texas for the Claris Engage conference. Around 600 people met at the Apple Campus in Austin. Great to finally visit the Austin campus and actually there are two of them in Austin: The keynote was in one and then the rest of the conference in the other.

We look forward to Claris Engage in 2025. It will be my 8th trip to Texas and this time I bring Stefanie to join me at the conference. Claris changed a few of the things based on the feedback, so the 2025 conference will be a bit different than this years.

March

CodeWave conference

In March I went to see Valencia and join the CodeWave conference. The conference was in Spanish, but still a few sessions in English like mine. Valencia is a beautiful city with impressive historical buildings, that got hit with excessive flodding in November. The rain for one full year came down in just 8 hours. So sad to see the destruction there.

April

MBS Xojo Conference

In April we run our own Xojo conference. We showed everyone that we can run a conference with great venue, food and speakers in a small town where cost is lower than the big name cities. And still you have plenty of time to talk, a great social programme to see the area and take home valuable knowledge.

Over 40 people from 14 countries joined us for a great Xojo conference. You can watch the videos on YouTube: MBS Xojo Conference 2024.

We run over 12 conferences already, but maybe someone in the US likes to pick up and do the next one for 2025?

For 2025 we plan to celebrate the 25th birthday of our company. Over 200 people got an invitation. But if someone misses theirs, please let me know.

May

CURL-up

In early May, I went to Sweden for the CURL-up conference with Daniel Stenberg. I brought my son Michael to accompany me. I think a great experience for a young man. The conference reminded me to help out in the curl project. My improvements on IDN for macOS and various smaller fixes brought me in the top 100 commit list on place 57.

Wedding

Later in May Stefanie had her great day: She finally married her boy-friend Wolfgang. We had a celebration in church and a great party afterwards with family and friends.

June

dotfmp.berlin

In June I visited the last dotfmp.berlin conference. Thanks to Egbert for 10 great years with conferences and our chance to walk the streets of Berlin.

For 2025 the Vienna Calling conference picks up and it looks like over 60 people already signed up to continue dotfmp with Vienesse style.

July

In July I went to Vienna to work on a client project in Xojo. Optimization of database access, memory usage, performance and adding of new features to their application. Vienna is a great city and you can go and see something else each time you come. Plenty of palaces to see from the imperial times.

August

Vacation

If you wondered why our blog got less updates, well we went on vacation. For over three weeks, we toured Ireland. It started with driving 1000km straight through France to the Bretagne to catch the ferry to Ireland. We stayed in a house on each of the 4 directions, drove all over the island to see a lot of historic places, phenomenal nature and met a lot of nice Irish people. I even organized a meet-up in Dublin with a few clients.

September

Reconnect.brisbane

In September I picked up the chance to fly to Australia for the first time. About 16.000km, 24h of flights, but worth to meet the Austrialian FileMaker developers in-person. Next one is in Melbourne, but please don't expect me to come every year!

Vienna meet-up

I flew to Vienna for the local FileMaker developer meet-up. Vienna is a nice place and I know quite a few people there.

The fall 2024 was full of queries about ZUGFeRD, the standard for electronic invoices in Germany. Since all companies need to receive these type of invoices from 2025, we helped quite a few clients to implement this using our DynaPDF functions for both FileMaker and Xojo.

FMTraining.tv

I regularly participate in the live streams for FMTraining.tv and in September was my 60th time. Richard his team celebrated with a cake! You find the videos in the playlist

MBS Plugin birthday

In September we celebrated 18 years of MBS FileMaker Plugin. Time flies and I am happy that I started this in 2006.

October

Xojo 2024r3

October started with Xojo 2024r3 release. After over 25 years of Xojo, we finally got preemptive-threading. One of the most requested features of Pro users!

FileMaker Konferenz

Early October we went to Liechtenstein for the FileMaker conference. A village in the mountains gets flooded by FileMaker developers every few years. Wherever you go, each view point, each bar and on the hiking paths, you find developers everywhere!

Please join the FileMaker Konferenz 2025 in Hamburg. Most sessions are in German, but some in English and even if you don't speak German, you can learn a lot. The videos from us are available in the playlist here.

Rome FileMaker Week

Later in October I went to Rome for the Rome FileMaker Week. This once again shows that each country has a lot of local developers, which don't come to the bigger English speaking conferences. You have to visit individual countries to talk to them.

Since Pause on Error was the same week as the italian conference, I couldn't go there in 2024, but maybe 2025?

MyCommerce scam

Also in October, we switched from MyCommerce to use 2Checkout and FastSpring to collect money in the web shops. The Digital River company got sold in July and we should have switched from them earlier in August or September when the first announcements of new terms came. Looks like we loose over 100K € there. Our lawyer is working on it, but not sure how much this will cost and whether it brings something. See blog article

November

EngageU

In November we participated in the EngageU conference in 2024. That is clearly the best one for the year! With 200 people from 25 years including 30 female attendees this is the biggest conference in Europe. We had a great time in Malmö and look forward to the 2025 conference.

We even had a booth there:

Security Fix for FileMaker Server

There was a security problem in older FileMaker Server versions up to 19.6.3 or 20.3.1. Basically everyone can read all data without authentication due to a bug in the code. The issue is fixed in 19.6.4 and 20.3.2 or any 21.x versions.

We emailed over 300 customers where we suspected they may run the older FileMaker Server versions. About a dozen answered and thanked us for the information. While most of our clients use FileMaker in a recent version (80% on 20.x and 21.x) and most servers are nowadays on Linux (64%), there is still a few servers out there running old FileMaker versions (maybe 5%). Please don't risk your data and pay attention to software updates.

December

Advent series

Stefanie put endless hours into her Advent series to build a database for the Monkey elf. She came up with 24 ideas, coded scripts for the example database, wrote the blog posts and decorated them with screenshots. We'll soon have a recap with the download of the sample script.

2025

If you like to meet us in person, please join one of the many conferences. We already booked Austin and Vienna, look forward to be in Hamburg and probably I come to Reims.