© 3-14-03 Pierre Igot

• Product Name: FileMaker Pro 6
• Company: FileMaker, Inc.
• URL: http://www.filemaker.com/
• Category: database
• Price/Options:
  • $299 each
  • $149 upgrade
  • Volume pricing for packages over 10 boxes
• Requirements:
  • For Mac OS X
    • Apple G3 computer or higher (excluding G3 upgrade cards)
    • 128MB of RAM
    • Mac OS X 10.1
  • For Mac OS
    • Power Macintosh computer or higher
    • 32MB of RAM
    • Mac OS version 8.6 through 9.2.2
• Rating: 2 bounces - Lackluster

FileMaker Pro 6 is a bit of a strange beast to review. And there are several major reasons for this (which are all, of course, interconnected).

First of all, as the version number indicates, FileMaker Pro is not a new product by any means. It has been around for almost as long as the Macintosh itself, and has gone through many changes over the years. This means that, like most other products of comparable age, it has a pretty big legacy. Many features have been added to it over the years, and it also has millions of existing customers, including educational institutions, small businesses, large corporations, and individual end users, on both the Macintosh and the Windows platforms (as well as Linux). In other words, it is many different things to many different people.

Secondly, FileMaker Pro is not a single product, but a whole family of products — and the distinction between the various products (FileMaker Pro, FileMaker Pro Unlimited, FileMaker Developer, FileMaker Server, etc.) is not necessarily obvious to the uninitiated, or even to current owners of older versions of the product. (For example, if you want to use FileMaker Developer 6, do you need to purchase a copy of FileMaker Pro 6 as well? The answer is: No. FileMaker Developer 6 includes the FileMaker Pro 6 software itself — although, for no apparent reason, the version of the application included with Developer 6 is currently 6.0v3, whereas the version of the application included in FileMaker Pro 6 is 6.0v4.)

Thirdly, on a more political level, FileMaker the company is not just any software company that makes software for the Mac. Indeed, it describes itself as “the database software subsidiary” of Apple itself. What this means is not necessarily clear to the end user either — especially since Apple itself is now offering various products that have a strong “database” flavor, and actually compete with FileMaker in certain situations. After all, these days, Apple’s Mac OS X itself includes Address Book, a contact information database tool, iPhoto, a picture file database management tool, and iTunes, a music file database management tool. What exactly is the relation between Apple and FileMaker and between their respective products? We are sometimes left to wonder…

Lastly, but most importantly, the evolution path followed by FileMaker over the past few years and, in particular, the degree of support — or lack thereof — of Mac OS X have been, to say the least, puzzling to some and frustrating to many.

In this review, I’d like to focus on some of these specific aspects, in the hope that they might help some people make purchasing decisions and others find out more about what they can do with the product that they already own. There is obviously no way that I can cover the entire feature set of FileMaker, even in its simplest incarnation, i.e. FileMaker Pro 6 — the software title that is the subject of this review.

Multimedia File Management

FileMaker has been supporting multimedia files (more specifically picture files and QuickTime movie files) for quite a while. What is new in FMP6 is that the application can now directly communicate with digital cameras or media cards mounted through a card reader and handle the process of downloading digital pictures from the camera/media card to your hard drive. In other words, FileMaker Pro 6 can be used to develop a database solution that effectively replaces both Image Capture and iPhoto — both of which are, of course, Apple-made solutions that ship for free with Mac OS X.

One of the “template” files included with FileMaker Pro is actually a “Photo Catalog” database that you can use for this purpose. You can create a new database file based on this template, and then use the “Import>From Digital Camera…” command in the “File” menu to import pictures from the currently mounted digital camera or media card to a specified location on your hard drive. You can choose between actually importing the picture files into the database itself (not recommended, since the database file size is limited to a maximum of 2 GB) or import the pictures to a specified location on your hard drive and then only store a reference to each picture file inside your database, along with a smaller thumbnail.

As you can see in the screen shot below, the importing process gives you a range of options for what you want to do with the data that is added by your digital camera to your picture files (in the “EXIF Header” part of the picture file):

Options for importing photos

Of course, it being FileMaker Pro, you can customize this picture database file to your liking and, if you are a developer, you can actually develop pretty powerful solutions for photo cataloguing.

If you are an end user, however, it is somewhat unlikely that you will spend time developing a customized database solution for photo storage with FileMaker Pro, when several ready-made solutions already exist. Of course, there’s Apple’s own iPhoto itself, which is a free application, if your needs are limited. But if you are a more demanding user, there are also solutions such as iView MediaPro, which is an extremely powerful tool for cataloguing picture files and other types of media files.

Compared to iView MediaPro, a solution developed with FileMaker Pro 6 simply cannot compete. Even if you don’t take into account the amount of time that it would take you to develop a solution that meets your needs and matches the feature set of iView MediaPro, iView is well ahead of both iPhoto and FileMaker Pro 6 in terms of performance. You can easily preview thousands of pictures with iView MediaPro in very little time. Even on a fast machine (I tested it on my dual-1.25 GHz G4 MDD), FileMaker Pro-based solution is a bit sluggish from the get-go (the file importing process, for example, takes significantly longer than it does with the same media card in iView MediaPro), and will probably become even more so as your database grows and you add thousands and thousands of pictures to your catalog.

The only real advantage of a FileMaker Pro-based solution for cataloguing media files is that, if you are an experienced FileMaker Pro user, you can customize your solution to your liking, whereas the iView MediaPro feature set is of course set by the application developers themselves (although the application provides full support for AppleScript scriptability). It should also be noted that iView MediaPro can catalog all kinds of file formats beyond pictures. Your FileMaker Pro solution can also be customized to support other multimedia file formats, but it would require a great deal of work to try and approximate iView MediaPro’s flexibility and power in FileMaker.

XML Support

In the software industry, XML has become one of the greatest buzzwords of the past few years — and rightfully so. It is a universal markup language that promise to bring an unprecedented level of interoperability between software environments that, until now, were unable to communicate with each other and exchange information.

I don’t know enough about XML myself to be able to cover FileMaker’s features properly in this review. What I do know, however, is that, even though I don’t know much about it, XML is definitely already part of my life as a Mac OS X-using content creator. For example, my recently launched blog is automatically published as an RSS feed in XML format on my web site, so that people who want to read it by means other than a web browser can subscribe to the feed and do so in a newsreader such as NetNewsWire Lite. I do not create the XML code myself manually: it’s all handled automatically by Radio UserLand, my blogging software. My blog is also archived in XML format locally on my hard drive automatically.

What this means, for example, is that, in theory, in the future I should be able to transfer all my blog data (i.e. all my blog entries) into a FileMaker Pro database. In practice, however, it would still involve a fair amount of learning on my part, which means that XML support in FileMaker Pro is still mostly a buzzword for me.

Conversely, all the data that I have accumulated in various FileMaker Pro databases over the years (and there is quite a bit of it) can now be exported in XML format for use by other applications. It’s definitely an improvement over tab-delimited text files, but the practical applications of such features are still limited, at this point, to a minority of people who can already take full advantage of XML in their workflow. For example, now that both FileMaker and InDesign support XML, it’s fairly easy to imagine creating InDesign publications that incorporate data from a FileMaker database and can be automatically updated through the use of XML — and even to automate the creation of PDF files in InDesign with a combination of XML data exchange and AppleScript-based automation.

The possibilities are endless — but for the end user at this point they are still mostly just that: possibilities that remain to be explored.

Interface and Mac OS X Friendliness

One of the things that have been most frustrating in the recent evolution of FileMaker Pro is that the addition of new, “trendy” features such as XML support has seemingly come at the expense of improvements to the core set of tools in FileMaker Pro. Unfortunately, FileMaker Pro 6 is not really any different in that respect. It does introduce some welcome improvements, such as the addition of a global find/replace command that can work across fields and across layouts, and the introduction of the new “Format Painter” tool.

But to the user of a modern operating system such as Mac OS X, with its comprehensive set of new interface features and enhancements, these small improvements cannot hide the utter lack of innovation on the interface side of things. Indeed, the Format Painter tool is strangely reminiscent of Microsoft’s own desperate attempts to make formatting more “user-friendly” — and we all know how well they work in a real-word environment.

For example, the Format Painter itself is useful in certain situations to apply the same formatting settings to various objects in your layout. But then you would also expect to be able to change the properties of several objects at the same time by selecting them all and applying the changes. The problem is that this works in some cases, and not in others. For example, if you select several buttons and then choose the “Button…” command to make changes to all these buttons at the same time, FileMaker actually attempts to create a new button whose area would cover all the selected buttons.

In the same vein, if you select several text fields to make a change in the “Format…” dialog, like check the option to “Select entire contents of field on entry”, and if some of the selected fields have the “Include vertical scroll bar” checked while the others do not, FileMaker is not smart enough to reflect this by display a dash (“-”) in the check box in the “Format…” dialog box, which would be the normal, conventional behavior. Instead, it displays the option as unchecked — and if you make any changes to other options in the dialog box, then it unchecks the option for all the selected fields, even though you never asked it to do so, and it should have respected the existing settings for each selected field. And the problem is the same with other options in the same dialog, of course. Even Microsoft Word does this type of thing properly! It is really unbelievable that, in 2003, we still have a Mac application that doesn’t respect such basic interface guidelines — especially considering that it’s developed by an Apple subsidiary!

The object alignment feature is still utterly inconvenient to use as well. You need to first go to one dialog box to define the type of alignment you want, and then go to another dialog box to apply the alignment. This is the kind of interface issue that screams for the introduction of palette-based tools that remain constantly visible and accessible. And it’s been an issue in FileMaker for ages. FileMaker seems to be utterly unable to rethink its approach and innovate in interface design — which, again, is really shameful coming from an Apple subsidiary.

Even more importantly, FileMaker has so far failed to really embrace Mac OS X technologies. Still in FileMaker Pro 6, there is no support for Quartz Text Smoothing. The toolbar architecture, which was introduced back in FileMaker Pro 5 and is available in the Mac OS 9 and Windows versions of FileMaker Pro, is completely disabled in Mac OS X. This might have been acceptable in the first incremental upgrade of FileMaker (5.5) that introduced compatibility with Mac OS X, but it is clearly unacceptable in 2003.

In many respects, FileMaker Pro 6 still feels like a Mac OS 9 application with a superficial “Aqua” paint job. In fact, it is totally impossible to use any kind of Aqua controls when designing database layouts. No Aqua buttons, no Aqua check boxes, no Aqua radio buttons, no Aqua popup menus — nothing. If you want to give your FileMaker Pro databases a Mac OS X look, you have no choice but to use pictures of Aqua controls and try to make these pictures behave like actual Aqua controls — which is obviously highly unintuitive and impractical.

FileMaker does have to maintain a certain level of cross-platform consistency and compatibility. Since Aqua is radically different from the traditional Mac OS 9 interface and from the Windows interface, it is probably a bit of a challenge to integrate Aqua into FileMaker’s development tools without breaking the compatibility. But, based on FileMaker Pro 5.5 and now FileMaker Pro 6, FileMaker doesn’t appear to be trying to make any effort at all to move forward on the interface front. In many respects, the interface in FileMaker Pro 6 is still exactly the same as it was in… FileMaker 4 (and even earlier). While FileMaker shouldn’t be expected to reinvent the wheel with each major upgrade, a certain degree of improvement is still expected — and there is almost nothing at all coming from FileMaker in this area.

Even the new database templates that come with FileMaker Pro 6 are only a very pale attempt at improving things interface-wise. In fact, you can even take that “pale” qualifier literally, because it seems, at this point in time, that FileMaker equates an “Aqua-like” modern interface with pale graphics and hard-to-read text and controls. Take the template for the Photo Catalog database solution, for example:

Photo Catalog template

Believe it or not, but things like the “Slide Show” and “Keywords” buttons in this screen shot are actually active buttons. To me, they simply look like grayed-out buttons, i.e. inactive controls.

To give you an idea of how Mac OS X-hostile FileMaker actually is, check out this file, that was included with my install of FileMaker Pro 6:

Thank you for licensing a FileMaker product.

May 1, 2002

This file contains additional information regarding the spelling dictionaries included with FileMaker Pro.

1. Using a foreign language dictionary

FileMaker Pro is preset to use a dictionary for your local language as your main dictionary. This dictionary is installed in your FileMaker Pro application folder, in the System folder (Windows) or Extensions folder (Mac OS).

In other words, this text doesn’t even mention what the location is in Mac OS X! (For the record, it’s in a folder called “FileMaker Extensions” inside the FileMaker Pro 6 folder.)

Unfortunately, this kind of user-hostile interface and the lack of adoption of Mac OS X as a development environment speak volumes about where FileMaker’s priorities seem to lie these days.

Stability and Reliability

The other big thorny issue with FileMaker Pro in recent years has been stability and reliability. I haven’t personally experience major data corruption problems, but I have read reports of significant issues, the most recent and talked-about one being with FileMaker Server under Mac OS X Server. (There are extensive reports on this at MacInTouch.com, for example.)

Stability, on the other hand, has been an issue for me, and continues to be. For starters, there was an issue with FileMaker Pro crashing when plugging a digital camera or media card to your computer. That was only solved with FileMaker Pro 6.0v4, and still remains unresolved in FileMaker Developer 6.0v3 — which is not exactly conducive to further development of FileMaker-based multimedia cataloguing solutions!

I still have problems with FileMaker unexpectedly quitting in various common situations — for example whenever my computer goes to sleep and FileMaker Pro is open. FileMaker’s tech support is not exactly helpful in that respect either. In my recent experience, they tend to blame crashes on Mac OS X itself and on “corrupted” user environments. I don’t have the patience to argue for hours with unhelpful tech support people, so I usually give up on such things and try to live with the crashes.

Then there are even more glaring issues with FileMaker Pro under Mac OS X that are still not fixed, even though they have been around for ages. For example, both FileMaker Pro 5.5 and FileMaker Pro 6 fail to open password-protected files properly if the application is not open when you double-click on the files to open them. Instead of launching and then displaying the dialog box asking for the password to open the file, FileMaker launches and then does nothing. (If the application is already open, then double-clicking on the password-protected file works as expected.) Since the bug was already there in 5.5, you’d think that by now they would have fixed it. Not so. The bug is still there in 6.0v4, and it’s intensely irritating.

(For what it’s worth, I have similar issues with solutions developed with FileMaker Developer 6, which fail to launch properly if they are not launched from the Dock or directly from a Finder window. So I suspect a more widespread problem in the FileMaker architecture — and I bet that someone at FileMaker is blaming the whole thing on Mac OS X and refusing to do anything about it. In the mean time, the end user suffers.)

Documentation

The last major gripe that I have with FileMaker Pro is the inappropriate documentation. Yes, the application still comes with a printed manual (two actually: a User’s Guide and a Getting Started guide). But this printed manual is not very comprehensive, and it is often difficult or impossible to find the information you need in it. To take a telling example, I did a search for “Format Painter” in the PDF version of the User’s Guide, and I didn’t get any results.

As well, when you do find something in the documentation, more often than not it promptly refers you to the online documentation for more information. The trouble is that the online document in FileMaker Pro 6 under Mac OS X is exclusively viewable through the Help Viewer application, and that application is woefully inadequate. In many cases, it takes forever to load, and then there is no way to limit searches to a particular application. In addition, the last time I tried to use the FileMaker Pro Help in Help Viewer, it simply wouldn’t work at all, with nothing happening when I clicked on one of the four main section headings.

(For experienced Mac OS X users, there is a way to circumvent the issue: use the contextual menu in the Finder to show the package contents of the FileMaker Pro application itself, and then locate the file called “FileMaker Pro Help.htm” in “Contents:Resources:FileMaker Help:”. You can drag this icon onto the icon of the browser of your choice, and view the help that way. But you can only browse the help page by page this way, obviously — not search through it.)

Compare this to previous versions of FileMaker, where the help was available through a stand-alone viewing application and worked perfectly fine. In this case, the blame is as much on Apple itself as it is on FileMaker — but the end result for the user is the same, and it’s intensely frustrating.

Conclusion

As this review indicates clearly, there are a number of things that are wrong with FileMaker Pro in its current incarnation. Yes, it is still, by and large, the “database tool for the rest of us”. And it’s still quite powerful. But FileMaker clearly has yet to jump on the Mac OS X bandwagon in any meaningful way. Worse still, in Mac OS X the application is both aesthetically unpleasing and, to a certain (not insignificant) degree unreliable.

I am afraid that the impression that I get from FileMaker’s recent product upgrades is that they are mostly living off their existing base and trying to keep up with the industry in terms of web standards compliance, rather than pressing forward with innovations “for the rest of us”. And this is likely due to the lack of any real competition in the field of user-friendly database tools.

This makes the price of each new upgrade rather steep — and it’s likely that a number of users will rightfully feel that, with such upgrades, they are not getting their money’s worth. If you are a user that can make full use of features such as XML compatibility right now, then the upgrade is a no-brainer. But for most users, it is highly debatable that spending their money on yet another frustrating upgrade is the best choice. If you are looking for a powerful multimedia database software solution, for example, you will probably be better off with purchasing a specialized tool such as iView MediaPro.

One can only hope that the version that FileMaker is currently working on (7.0) will focus more on Mac OS X integration and user-friendly enhancements.

- Pierre Igot

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