> Hi, > Any comments, is this is a major change or relatively minor ? > Lee Mills
I've been testing v9 Advanced since yesterday, with one of my major v8.5 systems. I've posted several different threads on some on-line forums (as sadly this list seems to get more and more quiet!), but this is what I've found. Feature wise I'm not that amazed with v9, certainly not for a full increment in a version number. The conditional formatting is the best addition for me, but I've cheated with containers, colours and calculations for so long, it'll just tidy up a system and remove extra fields, if and when I get the time. I do like the way you can add conditional formatting to labels (and custom tooltips with calculations too), just a pity you can't to objects like rectangles (unless I missed something), for a coloured bar behind a list, so still have to have a long dead field there or a fix with some blank text. Screen flicker/refresh redraw has got worse in my first tests, on XP Pro at least, and as soon as you add any conditional formatting to labels, every time to move to another record, the labels redraw too. I've some large main menu options with custom tabs, rather than using the tab control, for design purposes, those with more buttons flicker more when switching layouts too. I've yet to see the effect under Citrix Terminal Services (which I use at some sites), so hopefully screen redraw won't be worse... Performance wise I haven't run any major search and report tests, things seem a little more sluggish when navigating in a large system, but no doubt it's a larger application that v8.5. Script management, is a nice touch (I've been using FileMaker since v3, so long overdue!), but layouts really need similar treatment. Customised toolbars, more funky toolbar icons in Windows, they look sooo dated, Office 2003 look fantastic, and that's old now compared with 2007. Also a much better report creation wizard too would be very useful. Haven't tried the portal / field resizing, will have a play, been seems a wasted new feature IMO. Sadly I think the external data sources and PHP will pass me by at present, but probably neat new features. I had so many problems with complex report layouts for brochures using the internal save to PDF before, that end users were using Acrobat or other PDF creators. So that may (or may not) be better in v9. The ability to append may be very handy for people that use the PDF creation scripts. Checked the limited new features on the web-control, another missed opportunity there. The start-up screen is a complete waste of time for power-users and developers rolling out systems in user environments, hardly the most exciting feature, a couple of hyperlinks on a form, yep, and - and that's a "major new feature"! I'm looking forward to testing Server v9 on a multi-site system I'm going to upgrade to v9 shortly, the new admin console looks better and more coherent. The new "features" in the tab control, are hardly features, one tiny addition about sizing and a default setting, it's still a clunky tool, the ancient one in MS Access is far superior, and has nice, if a little dated, tiny icon options. Trigger actions / events, if that had been added, then it would have been a worth v9 update! Once again I've been using this is Access since I started developing custom systems in 1997, and I can't believe it's still not available natively as a behaviour in FileMaker Pro. Personally I can't see how they can justify this as a v9 upgrade, really it's just v8.6. If I was paying for the commercial upgrade I wouldn't bother, not unless the external data and PHP/Web were essential to your work. Just my take on it! Jonathan.
