Friday, 3 May 2013

My favourite feature of FileMaker v12

There is normally one or two features in a new version of FileMaker that jump out at you as being really cool, these sometimes end up being a long term favourite, but quite often it's the little one that slips past you to start with that proves to be the one that gives the best benefits in the long run.

The When I first saw v12 I thought the new way of handling containers and file management would be a great addition, and so it has proven to be, although easily my favourite feature are the new themes. The simple reason for this is that I am not very good at design :-) I can happily put a system together and it will do things others may struggle with, it will have all the fields it needs and will look pretty good, but I lack that design flare that allows me to make it look as good as it performs. Now however, with themes, a lot of that pain is taken away and it is very easy to get a great interface. Of course there is still a lot of work to be done in getting the right information in the right place, but I've not really had a problem with that.

One thing I would advise though is to work within the theme, don't try and work against it. You can do so much with the new interface designer, formats depending on what the user is doing, curved edges to fields, etc but if you make too many bespoke changes it then becomes a real problem if you want to apply a new theme. Admittedly this is not something you will probably be doing after the client is happy with the way it looks, but if you want to re-purpose the solution you may want to apply a different theme.

Have some fun and explore the different themes, they make great looking interfaces a lot easier to put together.

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