26 Apr
2012
26 Apr
'12
5:22 a.m.
On 26/04/12 12:17 AM, David Riley wrote:
On Apr 25, 2012, at 11:51 PM, Zane H. Healy wrote:
So why upgrade?
(See VAX on reddit thread)
--Toby
At 11:25 PM -0400 4/25/12, David Riley wrote:
Well, Bento is their "dumbed down" version that's supposed to
make it easy for dumb people to use databases. Basically, it's
FileMaker Access. Every company seems to try to make a crippled
version of their flagship product for the Great Unwashed Masses;
for example, Apple calls theirs Mac OS Lion.
I liked 6 a lot, though. To me, it's one of those Last Great
Versions you see of things, like Word 5.1 or Marathon 2.
6 is the last version I'd use with any willingness. 7 started a
long decline, and I gave up even trying after 8. Maybe their
newer stuff is nicer, but I tried using Bento a few years ago to
do up the envelopes for our wedding invitations, and wrote off
the effort after just an hour or so trying to get it to do
anything useful.
That's a really depressing assessment. Having started with a couple versions of
PC:File, then dBase III, and finally dBase IV, I found FileMaker Pro v2.1 to be really
nice. The only reason I upgraded to v5.5 was to be compatible with the FileMaker
application that ran on my Sony Clie (Palm Pilot clone). Of course now days I'm practically writing
SQL in my sleep, so I'm not sure how suited FileMaker is to me now anyway.
FileMaker is great at what it's good at. The only reason I have
these is for a job I did for a guy who ran a currency-handling
equipment sales and service shop. He ran his entire parts database
out of a system of 5 interlinked FileMaker databases, and it worked
great up through version 6. His entire office staff could use it
pretty easily. Then came 7, and the database format changed, and they made you change the way you link databases so his
old stuff
didn't work. That wasn't long before he decided to sell off the
business, and I'm not 100% sure it was totally coincidental.
- Dave