Testdriving FileMaker 10 and the new toolbar
So after being alerted by Google that FileMaker 10 was making its way through the final motions of being prepared for delivery on Day 1 / Monday of MacWorld, I had been scouring for details and found little. Sigh…
3 days later, Monday came around and my visit to FileMaker.com was rewarded with info on the new release and behold… a new standard GUI across the product, and at the very least a new Mac-ified customizable toolbar giving immediate access to commonly-used functions such as emailing exported records, saving records as a PDF, new record, etc.
The Good
There is positive momentum when FileMaker Inc. moves towards industry standards and right now, being a very pro-Mac application, FileMaker is taking giant bite out of the Apple playbook and instituting a standard, customizable toolbar much like the one in Apple Mail or just about any other Apple app. This consolidates a lot of important UI functionality from the menus, old vertical status bar, and the little buttons on the bottom left of the window. It can be set to just text label buttons (directly below), just image buttons (2nd image below), or image & text (above):
It’s great for helping new users make their way around their data and is definitely part of the FM playbook to nip into the market of Excel and all the people who fire it up for the wrong reasons. But, it has issues…
The Bad & The Ugly
This toolbar has one major shortcoming (unless I’m missing something) in that it can not be customized and linked to a developer’s functionality. In other words, no custom buttons on the customizable toolbar!
Many users and readers may wonder why this would be of any concern as most Apple apps do not allow such functionality. While that is true, most Apple apps serve a singular or narrow-purpose and are not designed for the wealth of customization options that FileMaker can offer. Over time, while many will celebrate the death of the stale vertical status bar from days of yore, they may come to regret the new interface of FM as being more hindrance than helper.
There are other things to consider in this GUI redesign. The usage of a status bar anchored to the top removes customizable screen real estate where developers have the least to offer based on the simple logical rational that practically every user display is horizontally oriented and offers more space on the left and right, than the top and bottom. The original FileMaker GUI took advantage of this and while developers have long clamored for the ability to customize the old status bar, they may not have gotten what they wanted in this iteration of a vertical customizable toolbar.
More to come
I’m still diving around in FileMaker 10 world, trying to figure out dynamic reporting, and more. Check back for updates!
8 Responses to “Testdriving FileMaker 10 and the new toolbar”
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The status bar change is jarring! and you’re right about the way this changes the real estate for developers. It may or may not be welcome, especially for solutions that bop back and forth in different views. And for those that pop up windows even more so as you’ll have to trigger different windows sizes if your workgroup is mixed FM10 and <FM10. I’ll be spending a lot of time with Data Viewer open before rolling out the upgrade.
Still if that is the biggest challenge in this update, good. Script triggers are the biggest reason that this version will be on our desktops as soon as possible.
I agree with all that you say and this one is indeed a MUCH trickier rollout as developers will have to take into account the different window dimensions for both v9 and v10 users. Oy!!
I’m working on a rehash of my current solution and this is something I’ll have to deal with more and more. Any insights will surely make it to the blog.
I for one hate the toolbar being placed at the top of the window. It just takes up too much space. This wouldn’t bother me so much if FileMaker would have made this optional/configurable as i don’t see why this new toolbar look couldn’t be done vertically as well as horizonally.
I like the idea of developer custom toolbar buttons mentioned by others, But this can be done in the actual layouts.
Overalll the new colors/icons for the toolbar are nice, but in my opinion do not make up for taking away the tops of our windows. I may just have to make it so the status toolbar never shows at all!
FileMaker please make the toolbar layout configurable, I want the vertical toolbar back!
I also would love to be able to do nested layouts, think of a new portal tool that could show other layouts, kind of like html frames.
I could just keep going here as FIleMaker has so many things that could be made better, like the checkbox and radio button sets, which are fine for small lists, but wouldn’t it be nice if they supported a scrollbar or if you could get rid of the stroke outline around the box without killing the stoke on the checkbox/radio button
Matt, I agree in large part. I like where the design is headed, it just feels so half-baked. There’s a lot of features that FM could have added to this and they just took it from the left hand side to the top, made it slightly customizable for the novice user and left it there. Now I’m almost certainly hiding it in my solutions and letting the users use my own navigation.
The toolbar takes up much needed real estate, especially for laptop use. How long will it be before FileMaker or someone gives us the option to move it back to the left side? Hopefully not long. Looks like it would be a simple option for FileMaker to incorporate.
A clarification…
Custom buttons can be attached to buttons on the toolbar. But you need filemaker Pro Advanced.
In Advanced…
1. write the script to perform your required action
2. use FMPA’s custom menu feature to attach the script to a menu item
The button that links to the menu item will now perform the script.
hth,
ft.
Yes, you can add scripted functionality to buttons but if your database functionality goes beyond New, Omit, Delete, and Enter Find Mode, then you can’t *reliably* add functionality to the toolbar. For example, I have an important button named View Account that performs a scripted search based on the currently selected record. I want to corral all of the UI into the toolbar like a native Mac app BUT I can’t because there is no way to add this functionality easily. Maybe if I use script the Export Records toolbar button to the script, then it will work BUT THIS METHOD FAILS if I have setup permissions to prevent exports -> this button then will be grayed out but not because of any criteria related to the problem, only to the fact that Exporting has been delayed.
Thus, my point is while you can add scripts to unused toolbar buttons, you can’t circumvent the link between these buttons & menu options and the link to permissions and file options.
Very Big Mistake. The big mistake with the toolbar is the fact that is on the top and not on the side as it used to be back with FileMaker Pro 6. Most of the screens these days are rectangulars wide screen, so the have the width but not the high. I wished it was customizable so you can put it on the sisde if you want to.