navarre.aiClarisTalk AI · the FileMaker AI podcast
Alexis Allen and Matt talk about Engage and Elevate FM conferences
Alexis Allen teaches design classes at FM Design university and she is hosting a 1 day FileMaker conference in Toronto, with a training day following the conference. The dates are May 26-27 2025. Alexis and Matt talk about Engage with all the AI and other goodness, approaches to design, our collaboration on teaching, and we nerd out a little bit about music. Many in our community are musicians, an
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Transcribed by machine (whisper, large model), 11,491 words. Names and product terms are sometimes misheard; the audio is the record.
Claris Talk AI. Claris Talk AI. I'm Matt Navar, our special guest today. Alexis Allen, welcome. Hi, Matt. Thank you so much for having me. Oh, it's great. You've been on here before. Chris and I have another episode coming up, but I wanted to talk about several things with you. One of them was where you went to engage. I did not. And now I wish I had. Yes, I did. We're going to talk about your upcoming conference, which is exciting. Yes. Yeah, but at first, I want to just dive into engage and talk about what you thought of it, what you learned. It was really fun. There's a really palpable energy in the air. I think people are super excited. AI, obviously, is the big topic for the year.
Everybody's super excited about what AI can bring. But I think it's really reinvigorated the Claris platform, not only from the point of view of Claris, but also people who are using FileMaker. And there's just a lot of excitement around that. There's a lot of new... There's a lot of new tools, I think. And personally, I have to just... Full disclosure, I'm not deep into AI. I've dabbled in it a little bit. I'm a bit of a... I don't want to say traditionalist, because that's not quite right. But I really feel like, personally, I want to focus on kind of the basics. It's just not my personality to jump on the latest thing. I'm like, what can I do that's really well-grounded and stuff like that?
But at the same time, obviously, I guess I would say I'm a mid-adopter, right? When something new comes out, I like to have people kind of... Who are... You know, really on the bleeding edge, go out and figure it out. And then I'm like, oh, I can use this, and I can use that. Like, you're probably on the bleeding edge of AI compared to me. So I'll just let you tell me what I should be doing, and then we're good. I have to say this. I have to say this. I try to be on the cutting edge, not the bleeding edge. But just before this podcast, I asked you to do a review of something, an interface I worked on. And you gave me feedback that there's no way I could have got from AI.
Right. The area of your expertise is something that it just does not do yet. Right. Yeah, I appreciate that. And I think that's really an important point about AI is that it has its place, clearly. And I think there's going to be cool uses for it that maybe we don't even know yet. But I think in a way, it's going to actually make what humans do actually even more valuable. Yeah. Because there are things that it cannot do. It cannot give the personal touch. And honestly, if you think about even from a design perspective, we may have talked about this before on the other podcast that we did about AI. People want to feel that a human has put some effort into what it is that they're presenting, right?
If you feel like the thing that you were given to use is just, it didn't cost anything to make, and it doesn't feel like there's been any thought put into it, and it feels just very automated. Just as humans, we don't love that experience. Like, we want to think that someone has put effort into it. Think about a low-end car versus a very specialty car that a lot of effort's been put into it. Like, why is a Lamborghini so much more expensive? It's partly materials, but it's also workmanship, craftsmanship, knowledge of all those things. So just, I mean, humans are humans, no matter what the technology is that comes along. So I feel like we're still going to value that about it.
And so I think the goal, I think, would be to find those use cases where humans are not very good at crunching numbers and dealing with very large amounts of data. The uses that I found it in my own experience is... It's kind of like if I have a huge document of, like, survey responses or something, right, I can feed that into AI, and it can pull out some insights, especially when it's not as structured. It's not like a single value in a field. Like, people are kind of phrasing the same thing slightly different ways. It's really good at that. But customer service, you know, like you said, design critiques that kind of take the user into consideration, that's harder for it to do.
But overall, I found there was super, a lot of excitement, a lot of people. Lots of ideas. And also, it was 40 years of FileMaker this year. So, I mean, that's a big, you know, a big milestone. I've been in FileMaker for a long time. I don't know about you. I started in, I think, 1996 or 97 with version 3. And so there was a FileMaker museum that they had. But before we get into that, when did you start? I started way before that. I started actually doing databases in 1983. And then FileMaker came out. Well, I didn't start, like, the day one. FileMaker came out April 1st. 1984. Five. Sorry. Yeah, April 1st, 1985. So, like, a little, like, a year after the Mac came out.
And I think I started with it around 87. Yeah, so a while. But there's lots of people who have come to it, like, maybe 10 years ago. Yeah. Around, you know, version 12, 13, there was a lot of influx. But I think there's going to be more coming now. And that's even, that seems to me to be the sense. Things are a little bit chaotic at the moment. I started with it six months ago. I mean, I love seeing people who have six months ago and then they're like, this is cool. I want to learn how to do this, you know. Yeah, absolutely. And it's just as exciting as it ever was, right? That you can make your own software. And all the reasons why we got started in the first place are still true today.
Except one, I think. I think it's much harder to start from, like, when we started it with three, even though it was actually, that was the first version that it was a real program. Because before that, it was. Yep, it was relational. You couldn't really build a big app. It was flat file. You could build some pretty big things with us. There was some real solutions built with, like, 2.1 or whatever. But at three, when it became relational, that was a huge change. And then the next really big one was, well, like, cross-platform, ODBC. I think cross-platform was maybe 4 or 4.1, something like that. Server came out way back early. And then 7, of course, you know.
7 was the big change, yeah. Yeah, so tell me, what else? So what else from Engage? Yeah, so I went to the Claris Museum. That was super fun. They had a bunch of artifacts all collected in a room that you could kind of look. It was really a blast from the past, like those old, you know, boxes of software that we had hanging around our office for years and years. It was fun to see some of the manuals, things from previous Engage, yeah, like bags and stuff like that, T-shirts, all of those kind of things. So that was really fun. And, yeah, I think it was a real good connection between the past and the future. You know, like, it has the... This real history. I mean, it's something to be a software company that's been around for 40 years continuously.
But then also still with the latest kind of technology being incorporated into it and people being able to do really new things with it that are up to date. Like, I know for myself also, I have a large client who's really happy that they're an Apple company. And they seem to be leaning more into their identity as an Apple company. And that's really comforting for a lot of larger clients who are concerned about having... having a small developer or a team of two or three people even who are looking after this large solution because it has the backing of Apple. So that history is super important, I think, for, you know, providing a foundation for the future.
And I'm excited and I felt it in the air as well at Engage. Great. I heard that there was some pretty big things talked about at the opening session. I know some of those were AI-related. Was there, like, a big bomb drop or something? Something like that? You're asking me to reach into my memory. I don't know. They did have it at the... Like, last year, people had been... There wasn't enough room in the venue to hold everybody. And so some people were in a different room. This year, they did it at the hotel. And so it was all in an auditorium where everybody was gathered together, which was really nice. It was a little bit like the old DEF CON days where you were all in one room and kind of watching it.
And to be honest, I'm sorry, I don't remember any big bomb drops. But it was... It was certainly a fun, you know, session. And they also did the awards at the beginning. So that was another change as well. Whereas the awards in the past had been done at the end, at the closing session. This year, they had an event, which was actually kind of nice to just have, like, a mixer to be able to say bye to people that you aren't going to see for a while and just catch up to people you hadn't maybe talked to. And then there was no formal kind of closing session. All of the awards and things were done right at the start. And so Robert Noe, just remembering the people that I know, I'm sure there was others.
Robert Noe received an award for community, I believe. And then Wim as well received a Lifetime Achievement Award. And he's like, I'm not done yet. Doesn't mean I'm over. Yeah, I think Vince won one. And he was like, hey, I've still got more to do. Christopher Leonard. Yeah, exactly. He'll talk about that one. After the 67 other ones that he has. Well deserved. Yeah, he has a lot. So, yeah. So that was that. And I'm trying to think of... I don't know if there is anything else. I attended a bunch of sessions that were... I attended Gaith's session. He's the designer design lead at Claris. And that was... I was really glad that we didn't really disagree on anything.
We were all kind of saying the same thing. And he's really trying to bring that design thinking to the Claris platform. And so I think we haven't really seen a lot of that yet. But it seems like that's what they're working on. And they're kind of thinking design first or design focused more than they have in the past. Which I think is... Really welcome now to have. And it's hard, right? Like, again, we were talking about a piece of software that's been around for 40 years. You have a model that has been established already. Changing that in a significant way, I'm sure, is very challenging and difficult. And so, you know, it needs somebody who's really going to think through, you know, what are the implications that you don't want to break people's solutions and all of these kinds of things too, right?
The one thing that it can't do is break anything from the past, right? That's like one of the things we've been really, really good at, except for like a few versions. Like the today function or whatever from forever ago. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember like opening a file and said, calculating the today function. It took like five minutes every single time you opened it. That was a long throwback. Yeah, I'm really glad to hear that. That design thing. Because we had a period in the past when there was staff at FileMaker who were really focused on the design. And, yeah, and then when she left, that changed. So. Yeah, I think it's always very difficult.
And I think it mirrors the struggle that FileMaker developers have in their own lives as well, which is like the functional versus the aesthetic. I had a whole presentation that I did last year. I was honored to go to a bunch of places around the world to deliver that presentation. I think it really resonated because you're like, how much, you know, I want this to work, right? But I also want it to look nice. And which side do I lean on? And, you know, Clarisse is a company that is trying to provide a product that is serving many different audiences, right? Some people are brand new. Like you were saying, maybe it's harder today to get your foot in the door.
With FileMaker, it's not as easy to start as it once was. It's a development environment now. Yeah. Yeah, because it's, you know, a platform. It's not just, you know, it's not as, I mean, you can do more with it. So it's the complexity, you know, problem. Like you have more abilities, but then it also makes it harder to just. You know, get on the ground floor. And then you have people like myself and yourself have been doing this for a long time, have solutions that have been running for years and years. And, you know, you also have people who are, you know, much more technologically forward thinking than myself who are pushing the boundaries and trying to do things that have never been done.
And so it's difficult, I imagine, to satisfy all of those audiences, right? And I always have sympathy and empathy for Clarisse as a company because they try to do that. And, of course, occasionally, you know, there's something. That you don't like or whatever. There's a feature that you would love for them to do. And why don't they focus on that? And I just always try to think about the difficulty in balancing all of these things. And, you know, for myself, I have a large client that I support. I've been with them for, or they've been with me for a long time. And they're very happy about some of the things like the OWASP stuff that they've added in, you know, recent times.
Like the, there's a few other things. I can't remember them off the top of my head. But they've. So I added a few really important features that are really helpful for somebody who's servicing a very large client. Yeah. So like back-end technology, fit-in type things. Yeah. Adopting standards. Yeah. Exactly. Where IT departments don't feel uncomfortable because they're like, oh, yes, FileMaker can do that. You know, we have the encryption at rest and the SSL and all of this other stuff, right? Yeah. Yeah. But then it's also difficult if I'm a small person, you know, who is trying to. You work at a little non-profit somewhere. I don't really care about all of those things.
So, you know, how much focus does FileMaker or Claris put on all of these different things? But I think they've made a great choice in focusing on AI because that's what is on everybody's mind right now. I personally think there's a lot of hype around AI, but that's good, you know? And I think that you're teaching a class, I'm going to be teaching the class at my, we can maybe talk about this, the conference coming up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'd like to talk about it because I, yeah, yeah, for sure. Let me get to that. Just like real use cases. Right? Like, how are we actually going to use AI? Here's some things you can do with it today that actually makes sense.
So, I've just segued myself into talking about the conference, which is, I think I mentioned that I went to five or six different conferences around the world last year, which was really super fun. I've never actually traveled that much in my life. So it was a really big departure for me. Oh, hello Kitty. And, so, I decided I wasn't going to be able to travel. And, so, I decided I wasn't going to be able to travel that much in two years in a row. And I thought, you know what, we don't have a conference in Toronto. We've never had one. And, so, I thought I would start a conference here, which I hope if you're listening and you're in the Toronto area or you're near Toronto, because Toronto is a hub, so it's pretty easy to get to.
You can fly right into downtown. It's a one-day conference. When is it, Alexis? Yeah, glad you asked. I wasn't just about to say it. It's a one-day conference. May 26th is the conference day. And then there's a training day on May 27th. So, I thought I better be a little bit. You know, like, what's the word, modest, my first time out. I've never done a conference before. So, I thought that I better just, you know, not try to tackle too much. So, it is one day plus the training day. And, yeah, I'm super excited. There's been a really good response so far. And you graciously agreed to join and do it. Why don't we talk a little bit about your course that you're going to be offering?
Well, so, there's three, right? So, there's you're doing one. Not on design, though, this time. I'm just kidding. Yes, I am. UI design. Oh. No, I was making a joke. Like, you're going to. I forgot to laugh. Doing an underwater basket weaving, which actually I think I read that one college actually teaches that course just because. So, Wim's doing one on server, which is going to be great. Yes. People are going to go to that. Is it six hours? I'm trying to remember the length of the training. Yes. It's nine till four. Okay. So, yeah, with a one-hour lunch break. Yeah. Yeah. So, I've been on AI for that. And I've been doing a lot of proofs of concept and some production stuff directly related to the trainings that I've been doing on AI because I've been doing several of them.
And there's actually, like, I think five use cases that I've built for people now that are just drag and droppable into those industries to a degree. And I think that's actually huge. I think the FileMaker community really needs to have actual real things that you can draw and drop in to do. So, I'm kind of giving a tease. Yeah. I agree. But, like, one of the ones I maybe have talked about it before, it actually crosses and uses a few different kinds of AI. But in a sales type of a situation where you have, like, a CRM, it has information on a customer that has notes about them, what products they've bought, where they are, what they're interested in, when they're last purchased.
Okay. So, you can use stuff like that. And then another database which has, oh, these are the products and we have some new stuff coming in or there's a sale on this one or blah, blah, blah. And then, you know, companies have to do, they do a newsletter, right? They send out a thing that says, here's our new stuff, this blah, blah, blah. So, what this use case does is it marries those two up and makes a custom, basically, sales newsletter or whatever for that client. And it's eerie how good it is. If you structure the JSON right, you do all these things that I've been testing, I tried a ton of different ways to do it until I finally got one that worked and impressed me, was if you take that information about the customer and you take the information about the product and you use generative AI to connect them together so it really understands where it does and doesn't, you know, connect, it would take a human, like, an hour or more to go through and put a letter together.
A letter together that AI can do in seconds. And then they can just loop through and do that for a thousand customers. And it's just vastly more effective than, I think, you know, at this point, I think a human still would want to look at it. So this is not something necessarily you would do for a thousand, but you could, you know, do it for your top 50 customers or whatever and read it and see, yes, this is a good send, yes, this is good, change this sentence, you know, something like that. So we'll be talking about that use case, I think actually there's several different components that come up to that. For example, there's a search that would be done at the beginning of that that would say for this product, who are the most likely customers, right?
So that's not generative, that's, you know, like a semantic search kind of a thing. So yeah, I think that's the thing that's going to be super fun is actually connecting different types of AI methods that we have together to one use case that people can totally get. And then the other end, another use case that's really simple is just using semantic search for a multilingual search on names and companies and text. Oh, that's really helpful, because that's hard to do otherwise. Yeah, it's amazing. It reads right through typos, it reads, it's by far, you know, having written search results, I thought a lot about search. And this is the fuzzy logic or whatever matching that I've dreamed about forever, right?
So that it just reads through any kind of. A typo and finds the one that's the closest it didn't, I didn't think it was supposed to work for names. But it totally does, because because I think search is supposed to be about meanings of words, right? Like, it knows that, you know, I don't know, boot and glove box are the same boot and trunk, right? For a car for English, or the same kind of a thing. And then but also know that for lots of other languages. But those are those are words or phrases with specific meaning. But my last name. Doesn't have any specific meaning. It doesn't have, you know, but if you spell it 18 different ways, or in different languages, it works, it comes up as a as a match.
And I think that's super useful. Yeah, that is really useful. Yeah, I'll be excited about that. Yeah, I think this is really great. And you're kind of showing how it can actually be used, not just sort of pie in the sky stuff. But you know, practical things as well. Yeah. But also what it can do. Yeah. Yeah. I was going to be doing a UI design course not to compete with your course, although it is because we're on the same day. But I ran this course in Austin at the end of engage, I was kind of tired at the end. So it was like one of the like, they had them at the training days at the end of the conference instead of at the beginning. And I think that in some ways, it was good, because people were able to kind of take the course, like they signed up during the conference, which they wouldn't wouldn't have been able to.
Yeah. But everyone was a little bit tired. But it was it went really well, I had a really nice group. And and I was able to, to do my UI design, I actually took the Apple weather app, and I broke it down, I created it in Figma. And I read, while I recreated it basically as close as I could get, and I could get pretty darn close, almost pixel for pixel in Figma as a mockup of the actual app. And then I also created it in FileMaker, which was really fun to do, I spent, I don't know, like a few days. Just creating what I could parts of it, there's some things that were easy to do. And some things that obviously you can't do in FileMaker, like the horizontal scrolling that you get on the weather app is obviously not possible unless you do JavaScript or something.
So but that was the point of it was just to kind of see how far can we go with it. And also just to do something completely different, you know, like, it's not your normal application, but just see what does that look like, in FileMaker? And and how does that differ from what we kind of normally do? Among other topics, and, well, you know this, because I was teaching with you on your champion class. Which is another thing I want to talk about. We did a co-teaching. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So that was the first time for either of us to teach a class together. You know, something I've been wanting to do forever, but finally, we're able to make it happen on the last iteration.
And I'll talk about a little about the changes in the champion class too in a minute. But yeah, it was really great to like to bring you into my students and have you with your teaching style that's quite different than mine. Show all of the things that they need to know. Show a ton of examples that showed this is bad design. This is good design. This is why it's bad. This is why it's good. These are the concepts that make it that way. That was great information for people. So thank you again for that. Yeah, you're welcome. And I'm doing something similar at the UI design course that I'm going to be teaching or that I did teach as well. I'm really trying to, you know, it's very hard.
Like design can be can appear very theoretical or kind of. It's not as concrete. I think we use this example of teaching JSON, right? It's like there's here's you. Here you go. You're the principles of JSON. You create it and you have JSON or you don't have JSON, right? It's either well formed or it's not. And that's kind of, you know, you learn the structure and you can go with that. Design is still an art. Yeah. Well, design does have rules. So there are definitely rules that you can create or sorry that you can follow in order to create a good design. But the problem is that. There's the combination is much there's infinite, infinite possibility, right? And so putting them all together is a little bit harder.
And so I try to balance the theoretical and the practical because it's really hard to do the practical if you don't have an idea of what concepts are you're kind of going for. But on the other hand, if you don't have somewhere to practice them, then it's really hard to kind of like understand how these actually play out in a real solution. So I feel like I'm always kind of walking that line of. Yeah. You know, trying to teach people the concepts and the principles of design and then giving them an opportunity to actually see how those are applied in the real world. Yeah. So, yeah. But it was really fun. Thank you so much for inviting me to that. It was great.
Yeah, it was. It was great. Like with with Jason, if you miss a parentheses, it doesn't work. Right. So there's a there's a technical level that you have to have that right for it to work. There isn't anything like that in design. I mean, obviously, the items have to actually be on the page, you know. But but it's much more infinite in the scale. And then like in Jason, it's like, what are you using it for? How are you using it? Which things are you putting together, you know, to achieve your end? But that's it's very, very different than, you know, something that's a visual and visual things hit you. Yeah. And what we you know, and music to you experience them in a very, very different way, I think, as a user.
Yes. And what I was what occurred to me while you were saying that is that it's hard. It's harder to know if your design isn't that great. Like with Jason, if you're missing a parentheses, you get warned right away, something's wrong, even if you don't necessarily know exactly what you know, it's clear that it's not working. Whereas I think with design, people aren't necessarily going to tell you. So you kind of have to impute while people are having a lot of trouble, or they're confused, or they're asking lots of questions. It's kind of like there's symptoms of bad design problems, but it's not as clear that that's what the issue is. Right? Yeah. So I think from that perspective, it's a little more challenging as well.
But what I like to remind people is that they're consuming design all the time. And so you know, you as a consumer of design, you actually do know what good design is. It's just that like, when you're trying to create it, it's hard to connect. Yeah, you know, it's harder to connect those two things together. So you kind of have to kind of stand back a little bit from your own designs as well. And just evaluate them if you can, which is hard to do, but I know. But one way of doing it is saying, okay, well, if I was putting myself in the shoes of the user, like, how would I, how would I react to this or you know what I mean? So but the other thing I find challenging as well is this a lot of times the separation between UI and UX design is not always super clear.
And I think partly it's because they're often done by the same person. But I thought of a metaphor for it. And I don't know if you agree with this, because we don't always agree, but I think that doing UI design. Is a lot is a lot like being a musician, right? So you have, you have notes on the page, and you're playing them, and you're interpreting them for the audience. And UX design is more like being a composer. So it's really hard to be a composer if you don't play an instrument if you're not a musician, as well. And so it's very hard to be a UX designer for software, and maybe you can be a UX designer for other things. But it's hard to be a UX designer.
If you don't know anything about visual design, I mean, maybe you're not a great musician, if you're a composer. Maybe, but you're at least understand it, right? And then you are creating something, the structure and all of the, you know, things that people need to actually put on the performance. So I think it's sort of like that. But it's confusing sometimes, because sometimes people come to you as UI design class, and they think, well, I'm going to be able to solve all of my design problems. And really, UI design is just a slice of design. And it's just too much to teach in a day, right? You just can't do it all. But yeah, I just wanted to make that distinction.
I like that. Well, we're both musicians. musicians i like that analogy i'm actually a composer and a conductor and oh right play yeah so and i i do agree with you it's really hard uh you know in composition school i studied how to write for instruments that don't play right and so be able to write for you know if you if you play flute and trumpet and you know viola i played in school i know how to write sorry rings and i know how to write for winds i know whatever cellist i'm just kidding i'm just kidding yeah sorry actually love the viola by the way i really do it's really nice it was fun to play um sorry but anyway you were saying about um you can and you can get in any orchestra it doesn't matter how bad you are oh no no i'm sorry i'm too much on the violists so like i guess what i was trying to say is you know how to write for those instruments because you have you know the family and the sound and the capabilities but writing for the harp hmm wholly different whole completely different thing right it's very different because of the complexity of all the pedals and the notes and how they work and how long strings you have to really study how to write for instruments that are outside your area but i believe you can do it composers you know uh i mean beethoven wrote he went deaf at around what 1801 and he wrote tons
of symphonies after that not being able to hear but he in his head he knew exactly what it was going to sound like even though there was completely different you know lines of everything uh and having sung beethoven symphony 9 i can tell you he did not know how to write for choir it was really really hard to sing and stuff on the lines or anyway um that is an amazing piece i played it as well a few years ago uh and it's just it it's one of those things you just learn like your heart is full when you and he's singing about friendship right like the brotherhood of mankind uh you know that's that's what he's singing about uh you know that's what he's singing about you know um and just like it it's just really inspiring and so i'm sorry that it's hard to sing but it's also a great piece well i don't know if it's hard to sing for that one the ranges and some of the other things about it are not uh best practices i would say but then if you think about it like when the voice comes in at that spot it's just uh to the drama and then also when the voices start they've given so much space and that whole oh yeah yeah that whole little thing in the in the first third of the last movement is just chilling how good it is anyway yeah and so i guess just to bring this back to design i think really we're saying that
you really have to think about who's going to be using this who's going to be interpreting this and tailoring what you're creating for that person because it's not the same like if you're designing for five-year-olds right that's not the same as designing for engineers right and so uh just to to kind of connect the metaphor i think that it's really apt to think about who is your audience right and how are they going to be able to interact with this um but um yeah yeah it's uh it was super fun to to be a part of your class and it was really nice to kind of sort of sit in and and you know and borrow a class for for a bit and uh this seems to be really a great group of people as well and and um i'm excited about seeing you in person here in toronto in that in may now yeah and we have a lot of people that are going to be doing a class as well sorry i didn't mean to cut you off uh wim decor is going to be doing his uh server class uh here as well which he ran in austin and so if you weren't able to go to austin toronto is uh closer and it's also the prices are are all in canadian dollars so if you're coming from from the u.s uh you get a bit of a discount basically so canadian dollars are like u.s dollars but they're on sale that was mean i'm sorry we're used to it just don't call us on the other hand
yeah euros are like 88 cents i think right now so uh you get 0.88 euro for the dollar yeah i think well you'll you'll still be uh get a bit of a discount for in canadian dollars as well when you come here so um yeah and toronto's a hub so i think i mentioned this you can fly right into the downtown if you're like boston new york chicago any of those major airports uh there's porter which are in air canada i think both fly right into downtown so you don't even need like a cab you can fly right into the downtown if you're like boston new york chicago any of those can just kind of take the subway or walk so i try to make everything really central um just to make it easy for people but um yeah and you have a hotel so you've got a lot of the things about conferences you got exactly right i'm glad you did that yeah yeah the other thing too i was going to say is that i know it's a chaotic time and um you know there's a lot going on and and we don't know about the what's going to happen to the economy but i genuinely believe that investing in yourself and investing in your own skills is really like the one thing you can count on and i you know i know it means taking a day off or taking a couple of days to attend a conference but if you've never done a conference before they really are an amazing way to build the community get to know other people just to see other people who do what you do right and a chance to kind of connect and also you know learn something really valuable and and new so i hope that people will um
will come and join us in toronto i hope so too uh i'm not sure if we've talked about this but if you've ever been online and i've done that at other conferences with my ai class it works really well i i i considered it but it's my first time doing a conference so i didn't want to try to take on too many moving parts so right now no but if we do future iterations if it's well received then uh definitely if we're going to do training it's a it's a a possibility but at the moment no they there's no um there's no online portion sorry okay uh there'll be square be there or be square yeah yeah yeah yeah i get that uh not to do too much plugs for stuff but my champion class i just changed it a lot um and also didn't so the content um i have a database that has all these lessons that i've taught over the years and i've broken them down into one hour um like really focused uh lessons on one particular topic like you know looping scripting or this is themes and styles and this is themes and styles version two you know so all of them are really curated to be the right length and with a really specific goal
um and the champion class was like 10 weeks long and had had 40 of those lessons in it but it was just kind of one big thing and i i decided to actually break it back out into three classes so there's going to be like a foundations class and then the intermediate one like for a developer and then an advanced or expert class which also has all the ai content so the first two won't have ai but the last one will and each one of them is 1500 and you can sign up on the bar dot training so that's new so before i didn't really ever sell them directly um i wanted people to um like you know email me talk to me about it i can get a good feel of whether they're going to be a good fit for it or not um but i didn't really i didn't advertise the price but um i'm not sure why but anyway now i'm doing that okay that sounds good i mean it's hard to know sometimes as a trainer right what people are need and want and different apps need and want different things but i can say people ask a lot about themes and styles and i'm also working on some stuff to uh to try to meet that need as well because um it can be challenging and i did i did do a presentation last uh engage about themes and styles so people are interested in that topic uh you can look up the um i think it's on the
community from uh 2024 engage um and i'm also working on some stuff to uh to try to meet that need about themes and styles because i think it's a recurring thing that um can i make a difference if you never use themes and styles and you have a large database it can add a lot of css uh i don't even know how i don't know i mean obviously there's a lot of legacy databases that don't have it but i i have no idea how to do anything these days without starting with a theme and and being rigorous with it you know i i try to teach my students that every single object on every single layout be within a specific theme and i try to teach my students that every single object on every single layout be within a specific theme and i try to teach my students that every single style and that there's no custom css anywhere ideally yeah and that you keep all of the areas with really limited you don't have like 150 you know styles for fields or something um keep them really consistent because that you know that's i think you would probably agree that makes for better design because there's less uh angry fruit salad yeah absolutely the one thing i would say is that i would um opt out to create two different styles if you have let's say they look the same but they're for two different purposes i probably would choose to separate those because one of the problems that happens is that people say oh well i have this style and then they change it and then it affects a bunch of things that weren't actually that same type of object
right elsewhere so um i would opt even though it's a little bit more code to load when you open the file because that's when the theme and styles get uh loaded um i would probably still have two two styles even if they were functionally identical but i would opt out to create two but if they were used in two different contexts i probably would separate them out so that you can change them you know and know well like let's say you had um a field like a merge field text that was a certain size and then you're also using that as instruction text or something right same font same size same weight and everything but one was specifically for merge field data and one was for writing instructions i would probably separate and have two styles for that because if i ever decided well i want my instructional text to be bold or something you know or i want to change it yeah exactly right then it's easier because then you're like oh i'm not also changing all my merge field because you've used the same style it's also hard to know unless you do a database analysis to know where that style has been used it's just an extra bit of work to do so if you know that you've only ever used it in one context then that's um that's that's uh yeah yeah yeah i i have a i have a style for a text object that's editable and then one that's not editable with the exact
same specs except the editable one is is a different contrast color so you know when you're looking at the layout that is editable and then i have a style for text objects for like a merge field or text object with the exact same font and padding so that when you put it on it lines up perfectly and i have an exact same style for a button bar so that you can use a button bar as a so that's right sometimes you need it to look the same that's right exactly you different function but it's the same the different types of objects but they you need them for some reason yeah that's that's absolutely correct yeah all the classes i teach i give a lot of example files actually the and then when i'm doing with your conference uh there will be an example file with all of the stuff configured and working in it and that'll also have my the theme that i've worked on that has all these things so for what that's worth also a quick shout out um the sponsors uh this year um our fm cloud um robert no from acolade and um uh charles delfs from fm better forums so they've all been super uh helpful and um really great supporters and given all kinds of support to the conference and i'm really grateful for that they will be there uh fabrice will not but um there's uh david lalonde who's uh canadian is a represent is the canadian rep for that he will be
at the conference as well but also fabrice is um uh if you have if you as the speaker want to host files uh he can do that for free as well he mentioned that on linkedin yesterday so just to let you know if you need a host um and then he can do that but yeah um i'm just i'm super looking forward to this i mean i never really thought i would ever host a conference it just kind of came to me of like well nobody else is doing it so i guess maybe i'll just do it and see what happens i think i have the same thoughts back in the day when uh i was in portland a long time ago uh we had two of them in portland i think uh anyway yeah yeah yeah i know exactly what you're going through uh and i'm i'm very happy that you did this we'll do are doing this oh well thank you what other stuff you got for me today i have one other thing i have an ai thing i want to ask you about actually okay ask me so there's a feature that came with a recent version of chat gpt that you might not know in the past when you generated images and you actually had to do something with text it had no idea so i'm going to ask you about that and i'm going to you could say just make a logo that says navar dot training and use blah blah color and now it's phenomenal at that so well let's just say it's great at it it's not phenomenal but you can
do multiple times like for wit for uh you should definitely play with this because for for making graphics and it can do whatever size you ask for you can say you know two to one or square or whatever and it'll make transparent gifs i don't know if make movies yet or not but i found it very very useful to make art for for special purpose things like for a newsletter for the website or for anything like that um so it's it's come a long way in the last few months really so before you could use it to make really cool actually in the class remember we one of your assignments which i loved was for the students to make a poster yep and to just get outside of the room and make a poster for a rock show when you gave us the specifics of what it was supposed to be and i had an image that i created but just for the background uh for the poster that was very dark and dismal and disturbing and fun um but there's no yeah but there but there's no way with the tools at the time that you could say make a poster with this you know but now i think you probably could do that it would be you know i don't know i don't know if you get the results that
you want but i think you probably could do that it would be you know i don't know if you get the but you could at least you could do it and it would actually put all the text there in the color that you specify with the font that you specify with the background you specify blah blah blah um so and i'm hoping that that i guess i'm asking if you think that might be useful for for part of your work i don't think it's going to be able to do uh i haven't tried things like mock up a layout that does this this this and expect results that are close to what you could do but um i would encourage you to try it and i also would just kind of like your know your opinion about that sort of thing well i feel really of two minds about generative ai art because as the parent of an artist uh and as something of a designer myself um i i really am of two minds like on the one hand it to me it can be seen as just another way of you know you've got canva for example which has a library of elements and so how is ai that much different from that um although presumably canva paid somebody to design the design of the design of the design of the design of the design of the elements and so i i am a little concerned about you know generating art that's derivative of art that people created and um and where's you know where's the line about that on the other hand the cat is out of the bag i don't think there's any going back on it right um and also all art
derivative of other like a human can only do pretty much derivative yes people have done too so to a degree true yeah absolutely uh i guess i'm concerned about you know artists you know being able to get credit for the art that they do and so uh anyway i'm just putting that out there as a concern uh in terms of quality i have not tried the latest version the previous version i asked it for like to do just a mock-up of a layout it was awful it was terrible um it might be better now and so that might um not be as much of a of a thing but i don't know i think it's kind of like anything else like other than the use case this is where you were talking about earlier where you have a specific business situation you have a problem that needs to be solved that is easy for ai to do and hard for you to do i think that's really a great use case for ai um in terms of like generating stuff um i think that it's good to a point and it's similar to using a template or you know buying a a theme from somebody else you're probably just still it's only going to take you part of the way and you're going to need to bring your experience and expertise the rest of the way to actually solve the problem like i
can go online and see a gajillion layouts and none of them quite solve my problem i'm still going to need to you know do requirements gathering and yeah exactly and make changes and stuff and ai so i think it can maybe give you a bit of a leg up especially if you're a beginner but there's other ways to do that too right you can you can get templates and you can look and see what other designers have done there's lots and lots of software out there so it's just another way of doing that so i let me ask you this so um i think i think as creatives who do databases and compose music and play music we have the concept of the overall thing that we want to do and then we have the pieces and parts that we have to pick from and a piece could be a theme that you buy and i really think i've been working on coming up with the the ai examples kind of like the example the the plugins in filemaker right where you can add in a calendar you can add in a rich text editor you can add in you know those ones that are now built in right i i really think the ai examples that i'm talking about are those if there's a common business problem that a certain set of tools brought together in a certain way can do this thing in just the same way that
many other design patterns can be brought in whether it's a theme or some jason thing or even just like a module you've developed in the past like i've got a notes module that just works for you know date and time stamp notes that you can assign to users you know i don't need to redo that i just kind of copy it's such a small thing i just kind of bring it so that's kind of what i'm thinking right design patterns that solve specific issues that's i think i think it's i've talked about on the podcast before i think it's incumbent on the developers who do ai to be thinking about those areas where there's a really clear win that you can integrate and then some solutions may just have one or none and some might have five of those depending upon what they're trying to do you know anyway that's my take yeah at the end of the day you still need to bring everything together and make a solution uh that works right and so how can you do that in the most efficient and effective way that you can so i i don't know yeah and i don't fault people for using things that they find effective and tools that they find useful um so yeah i think at a certain point ai is just another one of those tools and you can decide how much that you want to use it um you know as a creative person you brought that up like in i am part of a hand
embroidery group on facebook every single day there are multiple ai images that are um that are posted by people who are like how do i do this i paid 20 to somebody for this pattern and it was just an ai generated image that is not possible to do in hand embroidery that just doesn't look like that it's some it's you know or a creative way of doing it but it's just a way of doing it crochet patterns right um so people are there's there's this you know dark side where people are exploiting the ai imagery to make money and they're selling something that is um basically fake to to people right and so but i mean that's the history of the internet too right so you have to take everything and try to put guardrails around it as much as you can and take the good parts and try to minimize the not so great parts and this is really no different so you know if it's works for you and you find it useful then you know go for it for the moment i don't find it super useful and also i'd like to customize things a lot so even if i had a module i probably am still going to make some changes to it to fit in with whatever pattern that i'm using because all of my clients use slightly different uis and the colors are a little different so there's always a little bit of tweaking that happens well i mean that's all even if you're using a standard module
well i mean you you know if you if you're using ai with a zero shot where you ask one thing and you get it right you're not going to get it right you're not going to get it right you're not going to get it and you're done that's not using it right so it's really about the conversation like you get the first thing which is crap and you go like this you know change this is this and then you you keep sculpting it it remembers everything it did so it gets better and better as you go um i use it for i use it for a lot of research you have to know where to guide it right so yeah so you you still have to have that knowledge of guiding it so absolutely you're still an integral part of that process yes at the end of the day yeah driver's seat no question about it um so but i'm using it as a tool that may be able to do that faster than i can um because you know there's there's things like i think you said it really really well it's there for the things that it can do faster than you and and close to as well as you use it for that i asked it to design a 2d like house you know make a make a three-bedroom house on one floor with you know a kitchen of this size and blah blah blah man it was comical it put staircases going up to out of a window rooms with no doors it i don't know i don't know i don't know if you can see it but it's a it's a it's a really really cool thing to do and i think it's a really cool thing to do and i think i did a several of them and i laughed so hard because it was and i think it's the same as your as your uh was it knitting fabric example and embroidery yeah murder yeah there's no it can't know right there's things that it's just outside of what its
knowledge is but as things become inside of its knowledge which now like you know graduate level math uh those are things that are going to become really useful and i think now it's actually to the uh usefully you know custom elements with text and really specific stuff that that's new for me and i don't know exactly which model but yeah you're still going to need to know like it still benefits you to understand ui design though at a theoretical level so that you can um assess what it's giving you right i think that's that's what it's giving you but you also give a really specific prompt right that whole prompt engineer thing from back in the day you have to tell it exactly what you want you have to know you know you have to know how it is going to take the prompt and how to you know you have to know how it is going to take the prompt and how to you know you have to write a good one um yeah there's there's a lot of other things that you have to know how to use a tool right you can't if someone gives you a cello and say play they need some instruction a lot of instruction not only you know even just to hold it to hold the bow like this hold your hands like this so that your hands relaxed don't hold it in your lap like a guitar even though it's fun you know and before you even you know draw a bow and and
see how cool that low c sounds you know um uh which is partial to the low g on the violin i love that string that's great oh yeah yeah uh anyway we're talking too much about music i never really liked that low none on the on the viola as much it just didn't the body wasn't quite big enough for that it's an octave above the cello but the g on the viola is great yeah yeah i once had a dream that i had convinced the music director to play the viola and i was like oh my god i'm gonna play the viola because i'm like it's tuned the same like how hard this can this be and part of my back of my mind i was like you don't know how to play the viola but for whatever reason in my dream i was very convinced that i was gonna sit at the back of the viola section and no one's gonna notice that i actually don't know how to play this instrument and so then everything was great until i looked at the music and i realized oh viola's an alto clef and i have no idea how to read alto clef and so i woke up and i was just laughing because i was that was the most ridiculous thing and so you know violas can can uh feel superior to everybody else because they know it's worse than that that it's a movable clef it's not always there uh and you know they sometimes it'll go into treble clef and sometimes they'll just yeah but i can read treble i can read treble and tenor and bass alto is the only one i can't read so yeah because that's what cello uses anyway
people don't want to hear about all our music a little in jokes but maybe they do i don't know there's a lot of musicians in the community but it's definitely fun to talk about and i also really like talking about the music that i've heard and i've heard a lot of music that i've heard about like the parallels so when you when you bringing it up as a uh um like an example you have to have a different word for it it's such a good parallel metaphor metaphor thank you um yeah i find that i find coming up with metaphors for things really really helpful because you can torture them uh uh you know maybe past the point where they're useful but you can definitely find other elements of it that really connect to something that helps us yeah and the other thing i find is that ui design sense is a little bit like learning an instrument like i can give an eight-week class or even a one-day class um but i had somebody come back um and do the class a second time um and he said oh i i got so much more from it as well because you hear it once and then you need to kind of practice right and you need to experiment with all of these different things in your own work and then when you come back to it you might have the same lesson again but you kind of it fits differently and you understand more about it so i cannot teach somebody to be an amazing designer in eight weeks but you can definitely learn the vocabulary like you were talking about you know if you are going to prompt an ai or do
anything or just even do research you have a certain vocabulary you understand what that concept means and then you can learn more about that one thing and then come back to it over and over again and over a period of time you improve and you get better just like when you're learning an instrument yep definitely you gotta you gotta practice it you gotta use it you gotta think about it and you gotta make mistakes uh and then correct them get advice from experts that's what yourself and the good thing about design is the mistakes are usually not fatal right they're they're just you know you're you're a little bit you're not as effective as you could be so you always have an opportunity to redo it and get closer and revise it's just nothing set in stone here right and so um it's not like making a mistake in a concert where it's like oh oh my gosh it's very subtle and you have an opportunity to constantly go back and there's no right like it's frustrating that the there's no right answer but it's also good that there's no right answer because there's multiple solutions to any given issue right even from a design perspective and so that means that you're just trying to come up with something that works well and if you can and if you can improve that then that's even better but it's like there's nothing is going to be like oh that's that's horrible i mean it might be yeah there's not a right but but there are many right answers and there's also many right answers yeah exactly but i think that's the i think that's the case with kind
of any art there's no one right way but there are some right ways uh uh you know and you know i don't think you can even say they're gradation you know uh they're just right uh i don't know in this in the way that in the way that stravinsky the right of spring is right and bach brandon concertos are right and yet they're completely different um you know we're gonna notice yeah alexis for the best oh thanks man this conference yeah me too i'm really looking forward to it the weather is steadily improving so uh we haven't had it was a bit a bit rainy and cold but uh may is usually a pretty nice time there's lots to do in toronto i'm going to post a link on linkedin of like things to do in to uh so if people want to spend a little more time and do things around the city and what's the website for the three people who are still with us it's elevate fm.ca okay alexi folder is always a great place to find me and i'll see you next time with us to the end hi alexi we always have a tradition of saying that all right thanks so much for your time oh thank you matt it was nice to talk with you