Review: Filemaker Pro 9
- Article 54 of 89
- MacFormat, August 2007
A few useful new tools, a few not so useful tools – it’s another Filemaker upgrade
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Nevertheless, although Filemaker is clearly taking a leaf out of the books of Microsoft and other mainstream database vendors – particularly through things like its new Internet activation system – there are still trace elements of Apple attention-deficit DNA in its system. Bugs that have been around since version seven, such as the poor handling of fonts at small point sizes, are still in there. And many of the newer functions are still too complicated: it’s a mark of Filemaker’s move away from regular users that it regards adding functions for arccosine and arcsine calculations to Filemaker Pro as being of greater importance than creating a function for converting the carriage-return delimited text that comes from its list function into a proper text list (eg “First, second and third”), say, something of far greater importance to smaller developers in terms of development time.
If you already have Filemaker Pro 8.5, there’s very little in version 9.0 to really justify the cost, even though the ‘new feature’ list is quite extensive. Some of the functions are useful, particularly the conditional formatting, external sources manager and adjustable layouts option, but most are unnecessary or simple tweaks to existing functions. But new users will still find it to be the easiest to use and most powerful database management software for regular Mac users that there is.
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