On 13 Dec 2010, at 11:07, David Thorp wrote: > And I think that was the primary point of much of my previous email! :p > > The reality is it's both. And that's one of the amazing things about it. > > I think that fact frustrates the heck out of many of us developers, because > sometimes we forget about all those users who just use it as an application > (glorified bento, data-oriented and friendlier excel), but I wonder how many > of us would be in business if it wasn't for that fact. I believe FM's > popularity is partly due to its ability to so well cater to both markets. > Alas, in some ways that same fact causes it to cater to neither quite as well > as we'd like. > > Wouldn't it be nice if the division between the two was greater: ie. if FMPA > was *more* of an application development environment than it is (eg. XCode), > and if FMP was *more* of an application than it is (eg. better and multi-user > Bento), or something like that...
Well put! If the original developers are still around, I wonder what they think of what their little desktop application has become? We can't ignore the history of Filemaker and the user base that has developed. So we don't have a pure application development environment, and we get a lot of features that might be considered end-user-ish. Overall, I think that makes Filemaker a better application (even if I find the toolbar ugly!). Isn't FM Go interesting? It *is* the app(lication) version of Filemaker Pro isn't it? A desktop version of Go, priced somewhere between the iPad version and regular FMP, would give us a really replete lineup... Steve
