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One welcome improvement is support for multiple data-input keyboards. Here, a phone number field gives the user a phone keypad. FileMaker 13 now supports slide-control objects, various touch-screen taps and gestures, as well as popover objects that display extra info without requiring a new layout.įileMaker Go users can now enter data using a variety of keyboards appropriate to the data type. I think it’s cool, too.Īnd with FileMaker 13, support for FileMaker Go deployment-which was pretty good already-is even better, because my databases in Go can now look more like native iOS apps than they could before. I recently got an email from a lawyer client who wanted to tell me how excited he was about being able to access my database with his iPhone while walking around in the courthouse. I’m still doing my development work in FileMaker Pro Advanced, but increasingly my users are accessing my databases through FileMaker Go on their iPhones and iPads. Nothing in FileMaker 13 will affect my daily work as a developer as much as this.īack in the early days, we old timers would develop our databases using FileMaker Pro and FileMaker Pro Advanced, then host them under Server, and our users would access the databases on their computers inside their own copies of FileMaker Pro. With the help of custom themes, it will now be much easier than it was in the past to build databases with a consistent look.
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But the tools for object placement and alignment have improved in FileMaker 13, and even better, a collection of custom styles can now be saved as a custom theme, and themes can easily be imported from one file into another. Styles apply only to objects and control only the look of the objects (background fill, font, font style, font size, etc.) and not the placement or arrangement of objects on a page. We’re still a ways from the kind of control CSS technology gives Web developers. When the change is saved, the dark-gray button labeled More Actions will magically switch to light gray, because it has also been formatted using this style.įileMaker, Inc., did cleverly leave itself room for improvement for future versions. Here I’m about to save a change to the ‘gray buttons’ style, based on the look of the selected, light-gray Send Email button. The inspector panel used to manage styles in FileMaker Pro 13.
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For the first time in my life, I know what Renee Zellweger was thinking when she told Tom Cruise to stop talking in that famous scene in Jerry Maguire-“You had me at ‘custom styles.’” Hang on while I get a tissue. With FileMaker 13, I can just redefine the button style and be done in about 30 seconds. In the past, I’d have to reformat every single button on every single layout-work that often took hours. Say my default buttons throughout a database with 187 layouts use Arial 10 labels with a gray background and black borders, and now I want to change that to Helvetica Neue 11 with a light blue background and no borders. And once objects are formatted using styles, it’s breathtakingly easy to reformat an entire database simply by redefining a couple of styles. Once styles are defined, it’s far quicker to format objects by applying a style than by applying ad hoc formats for font, font size, field color, field alignment, padding, etc. Like character and paragraph styles in your favorite word processor, object-formatting styles in FileMaker Pro 13 and FileMaker Pro 13 Advanced are double-barreled time-savers.