FileMaker Pro 8: notes from an old user

I'll update this blog posting as I start using FileMaker Pro 8. I've used FileMaker Pro 3.0 on Mac and PC for about 10 years, so this is rather a big upgrade. Basically I finally decided it was time to retire more of Classic. FM 3.0 worked just fine, so there was no great drive to change. I teach at the U of MN on the side, so I qualified for an educational price.

1. Whatever the (legally binding) shrinkwarp may say, you may (illegally) install FM Pro on all the machines on your LAN -- Mac and PC. However, only one copy may be active at a time (in my testing, however, this didn't happen. I wonder if the XP/Norton firewall blocks this). Reminds me of the old Borland license -- from Borland's glory days. One copy in use at a time; except that was legal with Borland.

2. It opens FM Pro 3.0 databases quite well. The database file format appears to be unchanged from FM 7.

3. To my suprise the databases remain quite compact. The .fp7 file was slightly smaller after conversion than the .fp3 file.

4. FM Pro 8 is NOT a Cocoa application. Sigh. It's a Carbon reject. No services available.

5. I don't think I've ever skipped five releases of an application and seen so few obvious changes. It looks and feels just like .fp3. If I wasn't switching from Classic to OS X I'd be annoyed, but I really wasn't looking for new features. Update: It helps to read the small but extremely well done paper manual. A lot has changed -- all well planned extensions of the old functionality -- such as their relational model. I use Microsoft Access fairly extensively to manipulate GBs of data; I don't know if FM could handle that load, but in terms of 'content management' it seems have many things I miss in Microsoft Access.

6. The web sharing works, but the layout looked pretty bad in Safari. I'll have to try Firefox. I suspect it's optimized for IE.

7. FileMaker 8/Mac is significantly uglier than FM 3. The GUI is just not laid out as well. It looks industrial. FileMaker 8/Win, however, is really ugly - even worse than FM 8/Mac. Far worse than FM 3/Win. It's clear what OS this application targets.

8. FM 8 seems pretty fast, even on my old G3 iBook.

9. Under OS X 10.3.9 FM 8 installs in the shared applications folder. In 10.4.2 it installs in the user application folder. In XP it asks one's preference (which seems to violate the shrinkwrap license). This is annoying if one uses an Admin account for installs but runs using a non-Admin account. You can manually change the install folder.

10. I have a posting on how to import a Microsoft Access table via ODBC. Ugly.

11. There are no tool tips. Let me repeat that. NO tool tips. This is not a good sign.

12. I thought I'd be able to put FM data on my Palm. Alas, they haven't released the Palm app for version 8. Also, it's $50 or so. I'll have to see if it supports data encryption on the Palm -- if not it won't be worthwhile for me.

13. From the help file "Note In Windows, Microsoft Access can import only 32 or fewer fields at one time via ODBC from a FileMaker Pro database file." Huh?

14. More on #13. I actually sort of got FMPro ODBC serving to work. Sort of. (I've since succeeded with a small test file.) I got as far as linking a table in Access, but Access complained about an illegal character in a column (field) name. Wow, was this weird. Enabling ODBC sharing in FM is easy, but Access needs an ODBC DSN. So you need first to install a driver. The FileMaker web site says they don't provide one, but, actually, they do. It's hidden away on the CD in a developer area. You install the Sequelink driver. Then you use Microsoft's ODBC Data Source utility to crate a DSN. For IP address I entered 'localhost' and the secret port number is 2399 (it's in the documentation in an obscure spot). Despite what FM tells you, you need to know the account (default is Admin in FM with null password). This is so ugly ...

As of 12/05 I haven't done a great deal with this app, but overall it looks and feels like an application that's not gotten much TLC in the past five years or so. Given how creaky it feels I really wonder if FileMaker will able to port the codebase to run natively on the OS X Intel platform. I would be it won't show up there for quite a while, if ever!

Update 1/2/06: I ran the 8.02 OS X updater. If you run it as a standard user, it errors out towards the end of the update process. Some kind of access error. You have to run it as an admin user. This isn't documented in the update readme. The updater doesn't check and warn the user. Utter garbage.

Unfortunately running as a non-admin user destroys the FileMaker install. You have to reinstall the original version from scratch then apply the updater.

FileMaker has the same festering smell that Palm has produced for the past 3-4 years.

Update 9/18/08: This is a good place to document an incredibly annoying bug/design flaw I've run into before, but haven't mentioned.

Let's assume you configure FileMaker with user-specific security privileges. A user has no way to escalate privileges within FileMaker, so every time they start FM they get limited privileges. It looks like there's no escape.

The answer is to close the database file then option-click to reopen it. It will then open with a un/pw dialog and you can enter the admin account information.

FM 8 runs pretty well on 10.5.5. I think the web sharing won't work.

Using an LCD screen protector on an iPod Nano

Credit slashdot thread:

I wouldn't have thought this trivial tip required a web page, but it is a lovely page. Good value for the advertising!: How to protect your iPod Nano Screen. I'd been planning to do this. Radio Shack sells this stuff.

iPod Scratch Removers: I don't fret the scratches save protecting the display.

Google axes Tivo

Watch shows through Google TV | This is Money

GOOGLE is to begin broadcasting television programmes over the internet. The search engine has already signed up an American channel to provide programmes for Google TV and is in talks with the BBC to broadcast its shows as well.

The search engine hopes to build up a massive online database of programmes that can be searched and watched from any computer, with users able to search for episodes of any show from broadcasters who sign up to the service.

It will also let British viewers watch hit television shows from America months before they are broadcast in this country.

Search engine expert Danny Sullivan said: 'Google wants to become the world's biggest video recorder, and they are meeting with all of the major broadcasters to make it happen. It could mean we can see episodes of US shows like Lost before they are broadcast here, and also catch previous episodes in a series we may have missed.'

What do they put in the water at Google? For this to work they must be planning on an immense amount of capacity. I wonder if they'll do something I (and many others!) thought about years ago -- statistical start times. So if you only stream from the repository when there are enough approximately simultaneous users to justify. With enough user and a bit of delay and a bit of client side caching you can synchronize your video streams -- so much less bandwidth demand.

Nano: the screen does have a problem

Via Digg and ars technica:

Vendor issue blamed for Apple nano screen problems

Breaking news at this late hour brings some clarity to cracked LCD issues experienced by some early adopters of the iPod nano. Apple will, as of today, be accepting returns of iPod nanos whose LCD screens have experienced the spontaneous cracking problem. According to The Wall Street Journal, which quotes Phil Schiller, Apple's VP of world-wide-product marketing, a vendor issue was at the core of the problem.

The Nano is as scratchable as any iPod, and smudges show more on the black iPod. It's also pocketable -- so far more abused. The display must have a protective clear cover applied (Radio Shack carries these for a few dollars).

There is, however, a real problem with the LCD spontaneously cracking. Apple will now cover this under warrantee. It sounds like it will be fixed, but it may delay shipping.

Cool OSX Apps: excellent review site

Cool OSX Apps is an "Andrew suggestion", a tip from a friend of mine known for his geeky good taste. It's quite excellent; in the ten posts I looked at I saw 3 apps I'd like to try out.

MaxEmail & GMail = a great way to pass voice messages around

MaxEmail is marketed as a service for sending (PDF, Word, etc) and receiving (PDF, TIFF) faxes. It works quite well for that, but it has one other feature. The fax number is also a voice mail number. Voice messages are digitized and emailed; they can also be read on MaxEmail.

I love the voice mail facility -- as a substitute for the old fashioned tape/digital recorder. When I think of something I need to do, and I can't enter it into my Palm, I hit the quick dial for my MaxEmail number. When I get a connection, I hit 1 on the phone pad and I leave my message (hitting 1 bypasses the longish greeting message). It shows up in my work and home email, including my Gmail account (in Gmail the message is tagged by one of my filters). I listen to it and take action. Every voice message, of course, is attached to a time stamped email.

My wife uses the same service to send me messages. She's mobile and often do child wrangling, so I can process her messages from my desk and often act on them. Unlike standard voice mail these messages don't interrupt meetings, and I can even manage them when I'm on conference calls.

Far superior than any dictaphone or handheld recorder or phone based voice note service or PDA recorder. I think Maxemail should market this more than they do.

Update 9/29/05. One other twist. If you use iTunes to handle WAV files, then when you open the file it is copied into the iTunes library. There you can listen to it. If you want to keep it, you retitle it, add metadata, etc. iTunes is a very handy way to manage these sound fragments. Of course this library can sync to one's iPod -- handy way to catch up on prior thoughts. (Shades of the future where we'll be able to search metadata indexed AV streams of our everyday life, great stuff for old tired brains ...)

Good OS X Spotlight management summary (macintouch)

Spotlight is far better than the five different drive indexing software packages I've tested on my XP boxes. It is, however, still one or two revs away from really working. (Apparently, this is a harder technical challenge than one might think.)

This Macintouch reader report is a concise summary on how to manage Spotlight -- until it's fixed. One other tidbit. I was having a problem with OS X always mounting my iPod -- even though I'd set auto-mount off. Spotlight was the culprit. I dragged the iPod disk icon to Spotlight and OS X stopped mounting it. (PS. Interesting UI glitch. If you try to drag the icon off the Finder bar it simply vanishes. This is a "feature" -- it allows one to cull images displayed on the Finder bar. It's not all that intuitive as to how one restores them! Use the finder preferences to remove all instances of the icon class (ex. all network drives) then save prefs then add all back in.)

Mac OS X 10.4.2 (Part 31)Jeff Mincey

Regarding Spotlight and its supposed incomplete indexing of drive volumes, there is a procedure one can follow which will force Spotlight to re-index a volume and thus spare the user from having to open and close each individual Microsoft Word document he (she) wants indexed.

Chris Breen offers this: 'Open the Spotlight system preference, click the Privacy tab, click the plus button, and add the volume you want to reindex. Wait five minutes, select the volume in the privacy area, and click the minus button to remove it. Spotlight will index the volume again from the ground up.'

Chris goes on to say... 'Before reindexing the drive, repair permissions. Also, if the drive has just recently been indexed, give it another day or so before reindexing. It‚s possible that Spotlight hasn‚t completely finished indexing the drive even though you‚re allowed to use it.'

Once an entire volume is indexed for Spotlight, then individual new files or files newly revised and saved, will be indexed on a case by case basis thereafter. One can also perform this operation (and others) from the command line, as this tip (from Mac OS X Hints) illustrates:

To turn off indexing;

sudo mdutil -i off /Volumes/hard_drive_name

To remove the index;

sudo mdutil -E /Volumes/hard_drive_name

Physically remove the .Spotlight directories from the root of each drive.

cd /
sudo rm -fr .Spotlight-V100

To turn it back on;

sudo mdutil -i on /Volumes/hard_drive_name

ThinkSecret reports 10.4.3 has over 500 fixes. I'm expecting Spotlight will get much better in a few weeks. It is overly aggressive about deciding what it's going to index.