FileMaker Pro 13 Tip-n-Trick Creating a Progress Status Bar

Hey man, Free-base64 is cool with this FileMaker Pro 13 Tip-n-Trick of Creating a Progress Status Bar

 
Or for those who are true nerdy geeks –

All your base64 are belong to us, But We’ll Share this FileMaker Pro 13 Tip-n-Trick of Creating a Progress Status Bar

Andy Persons shares his first FileMaker Pro 13 Tip-n-Trick  that demonstrates ProgressBar(), a custom function that provides a simple and lightweight progress status bar.

What Got Me Thinking

When I saw the Base64Decode function in the newly released FileMaker 13, my first thought was “why, you could theoretically calculate any image you want!” My second thought was: “would the complexity be worth it?” So, I decided to start with something simple: a 1 by 100-pixel graphic to display a progress bar. First, I tried creating .png images of various sizes, encoding them using Base64Encode() and comparing what changed. No go. I couldn’t discern any consistent patterns.

Next, I tried the same process using .bmp files. Better, but the patterns were still inconsistent.

Finally, I decided I needed to rethink my approach. I researched base 64 a bit more and realized that the patterns weren’t consistent because it concatenates all bits from the original and encodes them in 6-bit chunks. The best approach would be to build the bitmap from the ground up, if feasible.