Hi Brendon,
The new update was working and looked great with the Helvetica Condensed Medium font I need to use—-until I saved a backup! And then all the text in the fields reverted back to Helvetica Regular (True Type). The Text inspector, however, is working. The sudden switch back to Helvetica Regular when I made a backup, I can’t fathom why.
Yes, I can go back again and change everything to Helvetica Condensed Medium PostScript Type 1 font—-a big waste of time–but now I’m scared it will do the same again.
I’ve attached a form template showing how Helvetica Regular messes up my form—-how I now have to raise each field a couple points to match the underlying form and how the fat Helvetica is too long for some dollar amounts to display.
Funny thing is: Other layouts use Note fields and the Helv Cond Med is not affected at all, any time.
Question: If a future update causes problems, how does one go back to a previous version?
Is there a way to tell Tap Forms I want a default font different from Helvetica Regular.
Are True Type fonts more reliable and stable than PostScript Type 1 fonts? (There could be something weird about my Helvetica Condensed Medium. Perhaps I should try another condensed font and see what happens.)
Regarding the previous $0.00 Text Field quirk, it doesn’t happen any longer with the new update. Not sure what the problem was but I got it to repeat the funny behavior several times under the 5.1.2. Now, creating a new text field is fine.
Thanks,
Bob
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Hi Brendan, Thanks for jumping on to this. I’m using Mac’s internal Font Book. I see that Helvetica Regular is True Type. The font I use and specified for the fields is Helvetica Medium Condensed, a Postscript Type 1 font. Not sure if that makes a difference. Maybe a TrueType font would work better. (Although, Helvetica Med Condensed was working prior to the update.)
Yes, fixing the inspector’s ability would be great.
One little thing for the future regarding the type inspector bar that has the align icons… Gosh, if we could have the icons with ability to distribute spacing between fields vertically and horizontally, that would be a godsend. It would save so much time getting fields positions perfectly.
Carry on the great work and support, you geniuses!
Bob
Hmmm, I think Jimmy is looking for something a little different, which might require a scripting capability or a new twist on an IF statement. In Jimmy’s actual case, each address might comprise several fields such as street/city/province/postal_code, but that’s irrelevant for this discussion. It’s essentially this:
1) You have two text fields: Property_Address and Billing_Address. BOTH fields are editable by the user.
2) You have a checkmark field: “Billing_Same_as_Property”.
==> If the user checks the checkmark field, then the contents of the Property Address field will be copied to Billing Address field, and replace any content that might already be in the Billing Address field. If the checkmark field is unchecked, then the user can enter anything he wants into the Billing_Address field.
I could envision an “IFEDITABLE” function that works like this:
IFEDITABLE (test_condition, [field is editable by user], [calculated value])
So in Jimmy’s case, his Billing_Address field would have this formula:
IFEDITABLE(Billing_Same_as_Property=0, [field is editable], [Property_Address])
Something to add to the wish list?
Thanks,
Mike
Hi Luka,
Thanks for the feature request.
I don’t have an automated way of exporting the data. I would like to add AppleScript support at some point for tasks like that. Just haven’t had time to do that yet. For now you would have to manually initiate the export to a CSV file.
Thanks,
Brendan
I have a expense tracker form that includes date, payee, sales tax, amount of purchase, gallons of gas, description, copy of receipt. I know what my available income per month and annually are. What I want to do is to be able to calculate is total spent each each minus available income to show savings each month and also to calculate the total spent for the year less available income per year
Thanks
T Flick
Just got Tap Forms 5 for iPhone and began the process of sending my document file from my Mac to my phone. Tap Forms was running on both devices, my document was closed on the Mac, and I initiated sharing. My iPhone showed up in the device list, I selected it and got started. The iPhone prompted me to accept the file transfer, and things got underway compressing and sending. The file itself is approx 230 MB. A little more than half-way through the transfer it stalled with this error message:
Error Domain=MCSession Code=5 “Resource transfer cancelled” UserInfo={NSLocalizedDescription=Resource transfer cancelled}. I didn’t touch anything during the transfer — Honest!
I tried to restart the transfer, but it wouldn’t start and the Mac app showed a “Waiting” button on the “Select Device” sheet. Clicking the Waiting button resulted in the “Accept Document” prompt reappearing on the iPhone, but after tapping OK, nothing happened.
Then I restarted both the Mac and iPhone apps and tried again with the much smaller Sample Documents file. This one copied over successfully, so I then retried my 230 MB database document. First try, I didn’t get past the “Waiting” button, but the second try it compressed the file and began sending it, and the transfer completed.
So, mission accomplished but not without a struggle. I’m using OS X 10.11.6 on a mid-2009 MacBook Pro, and iOS 10.2.1 on an iPhone 5. Any thought on how this could have gone more smoothly?
Thanks,
Mike
Hi Philip,
No I’m sorry but there’s no scripting function in Tap Forms.
Thanks,
Brendan
Does tapforms have something to ‘Scripts’ as found in FilemakerPro.
That is, an automated way to run a series of commands?
I updated to version 5 for no particular reason except to support the app and keep current. i didn’t really know what was in it. After a couple of months I tried search again and I was blown away by by the improved functionality. I guess I should read release notes. Outstanding. Thanks. It covers many things I used to export to Pythonista and write python scripts for. As usual the user interface for the new code is cranky and often not intuitive. Since I have lots of issues with Tap forms navigation I find this is consistent with the rest of the product: Outstanding functionality with confusing and opaque user interface. (Someday I’ll figure out how to use Tap Forms on my Apple Watch. I’ve been trying sporadically for a week. I’m sure I will figure it out eventually. Currently I can’t get anything except the watch icon on the document and the empty forms window on the watch.)
So side notes aside the search and filter functionality take an already great data base to a new level.
I have spent a lot of time developing Home Inventory database applications over the years, so thought I could pass on some of that knowledge in this TAP forms template.
The template captures warranty details, Loans of items to other people, the ability to add invoices and other related documents and of course photos.
The Item field is automatically constructed from the Manufacturer, Model No and Description.
Hope you find it useful
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Superscript can be applied in a regular Text field using PopChar.
Hi Brendan,
sorry to hear all that…
However, before I loose lots of time with the Nearby sync because, forgive me, the manual is a bit terse, I want to clarify some thints. Is it correct that there is no automatic sync with Nearby sync, ie, that I have to initiate the sync manually? (A bit like it was for Bento?)
Also, the sentence
Each device must be on and have the same database document open at the same time in order for Nearby sync to function. The moment you make a change on one device is when synchronization will begin on all your devices.
is not clear to me. Does it mean that I have to make changes on a database (if I want to sync it) while all the devices are on with the corresponding databases open at the same time? It sounds fairly restrictive… It is fine if I have to sync “Bento style”, ie, I have to push a button to get it done, but that description makes me worried…
Are custom layouts a feature of the iOS version yet? I was quite excited when I read in the iOS app description that you can “create and design custom forms exactly how you want to.” But apparently, you don’t mean by “forms” what I would expect: Different ways of viewing your data, as in the Numbers for iOS “Form” view. That you would name your app after this feature made me think that it must be quite advanced at form creation.
By the way; for anyone who wants to pick this up, I’m attaching my Python script. This only does the “easy part” of breaking out the Bento exported simple table columns (which are packed into a single CSV column) to separate CSV files suitable for import as a TapForms related form.
The main manual part after that, that I remember now, was to break into the TapForms DB schema to get the parent form UUID (after importing it), and then going back to edit that into the proper column in the related forms.
The script as presented also has some extra logic to process pick list data, partly to help do some cleanup and translation; but that’s the only part that’s specific to my data.
A lot of this would be much easier to do inside TapForms… but as it didn’t bubble up to the top of Brendan’s priority list a year or two ago when the Bento ship was sinking, and the subject hasn’t really come up a lot since, I doubt it’s going to rate very highly now.
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I am one of the late migrators from Bento to Tapforms, exactly because i can’t get my simple lists over. Is it possible for a lot less IT-skilfull person to do, what you did? Would it be possible to ask you for a guide in simple words?
When I worked out my procedure in the first place I’d considered trying to package it as a “no touch” conversion process. That would have been really complicated because I needed to do it in several stages. It exported the data from Bento, imported the main form into TapForms so that I could look at the private TapForms sqlite DB tables to pull out table ID numbers which I’d then edit into the related table CVS files.
I had a Python script that would separate the Bento simple list columns into separate CSV files; but everything else (and there was a lot) was manual just because for the volume of data I had that was a lot easier than trying to script it. I’m afraid I didn’t even keep as detailed notes on the process as I should have, which means it’d take me a lot of time to work through it again.
And even if I did all that, now that TapForms 5 is out, with very likely a very different DB schema, I’d have to work through all that before it was useful.
And, in case you haven’t already gotten the right impression from all this, explaining it in “simple terms” would prove difficult!
As much as I’d love to be able to help, I just don’t think that’s practical. Sorry.
