Peter De Berdt wrote:
I feel sorry for all those people being forced to upgrade all
their Filemaker Clients again just for universal binary support.
All I was trying to say, is that over time (we have customers with
30-40 clients) license cost just for the clients is huge: Filemaker 6
-> 7 -> 8 -> 8.5, you do the math.
The 8.5 upgrade is for much more than universal support. The speed
on both PPC and Intel is substantially faster, with MacWorld
getting several times the performance on huge tables using a PPC.
The internal engine was completely reworked to optimize searches.
Yeah, well, having worked with Filemaker (really big CRM/ERP
application) for over 6 years, from 4 up to 8 (although I quit the
job involving Filemaker 7-8), it doesn't really matter if they
eventually installed a motor on a bicycle.
Also, you have named objects, named tabs, new script commands, and
live a live Web control. The live Web control alone is worth an
upgrade to some users. You create the data string using an FM
script and then the Web control can display data from sources such
as Amazon or Google. The ability to grab data from an external
source and put it directly into a table -- along with a live Web
page -- is pretty nice, especially since it is part of your runtime
solution, then.
These are all things I'm able to do myself using RB or some other
programming language. The custom menus are a nice option for example,
but you couldn't define them to be disabled back in Filemaker 8
(don't know about Filemaker 8.5).
There are other control changes, and the visual relationship
designer reminds me of Access. The fact everything is in a single
file was a nice change in FM 7. It is definitely changing more in
the future, with hints of an improved query designer.
That's all filemaker 7 stuff. I have this feeling Filemaker is
finally trying to catch up, but for me, it's too late.
Version 9 is supposed to use all "native" Cocoa controls, so I'll
be a much happier FM user. I would like the tab control to look
more Mac-like instead of old-style, but most users don't care as
much as I do. I hate thinking, "This looks like OS 9 or Windows!"
We had our own interface, which looked kinda nice, nothing like macos
9 or the default templates from filemaker. But nice to hear they will
be doing that. Guess they finally realized people switched to servoy
(which i don't like that much either) because it had better stuff
going on. On thing I'm still missing in Filemaker is events, and
having used both ScriptScheduler/oAzium Events and EventScript, they
just don't cut it.
Still, I would not use FM for nearly half the solutions I have
seen. I still don't understand POS solutions in FM, especially
pre-7 when you had to create a mess of files, with logic and tables
scattered in a directory. I still pull data from logic, but that
can leave me with two files or maybe three instead of hundreds.
Well, we did it, and now that some customers have to deal with 50.000
time registrations and god knows how many records in total, it's just
ugly slow. It was great at the time and the advertising agencies (our
target audience) knew Filemaker so it was a great sale argument.
REALbasic is a far better solution for a Mac-like experience --
which is saying something when FM is an Apple product. I don't like
some of the RB controls, but they are more "authentic" than the
terrible bitmap arrows on portals and subforms in FM. Where FM does
have RB surpassed is reporting -- FM is a database, while RB is a
tool for presenting data from another source.
True, you have to write your own reporting tool, just like e.g.
Revolver from Revolversoft has.
If you want to program and control the user experience, you should
use something with a programming language. I still don't consider
FM "programming" when you click about to create scripts. That's
just my own sense that I want more control over the user experience.
I still like to use Filemaker for a rapid prototype (you get quite
good at it, know all the workarounds :-)) to show to a prospect or
customer, just to make sure that's what they want, it's a great way
of communicating.
RB still doesn't create the most optimized code -- for size or
speed -- and I have never accepted the argument that larger drives
and faster CPUs render that moot. As people have more space, the
store more data for greater historical analysis. Program execution
speed can matter if it is manipulating a lot of text data.
Who said I'm using REALbasic for the big apps? REALbasic can get a
lot done in very little time compared to other applications. I used
REALbasic with my own Filemaker classes (allowing me to use SQL from
REALbasic to interface with Filemaker without using ODBC) to
synchronize and/or transfer our customers' data to MySQL (thanks
again Alex from Too Much Space for his great plug-in), it worked
great (and still runs day in day out at some of our customers).
I am pleased that FileMaker recognized their engine was a three-
legged dog in the race. RB's database plug-ins can only address a
part of the database puzzle, and I recognize this.
Filemaker has its place, of course: small in-house databases
accessible to anyone, even a non-programmer. I'm not trying to bash
Filemaker btw, it has been great fun up to a certain point, then you
start hitting walls and can't migrate to a better solution that easily.
Best regards
Peter De Berdt
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