Jonathon.
Thank you for your very worthy comments, particularly useful for me.
I develop solutions for a great variety of small businesses with no need
for SQL.
There is obviously no need for me to move on yet from 8.5 Advanced.
I can appreciate your point regarding this group. However, I don't
'belong' to any other 'list' but do find that
from time to time much has been gained for being in this 'list'. I hope
on a couple of rare occasions I have been able to contribute something
of value.
Thanks again for your detailed response I really appreciated it.
Lee
Jonathan wrote:
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.
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