FileMaker 13 is here! Let’s see what’s new

Filemaker 13

So a new Filemaker version is born! A happy occasion for all Filemaker developers I think, all eager to get their hands on a copy and see what goodies Filemaker is delivering this time…

Having played with this version a bit I will give you a quick rundown of some of the new features and my overall take on this version.

I think anyone who has been to Devcon 2013 in San-Diego this year got the same impression as me, that Filemaker is putting the emphasis now on User-Interface (UI), User-Experience (UX) and Web publishing.

 

Filemaker 13 brings us a lot of graphic tools to make solutions more attractive and help developers develop faster. The other big thing is WebDirect, the new web engine that was built from scratch to replace the old Instant Web Publishing (IWP) that couldn’t really cut it anymore in the progressing world of internet design (although we do lose the capability to share from a client).

 

So let’s dig in:

The only noticeable thing really in browse mode is the new ‘Share’ button at the top. This is used to upload files to the server and for sharing locally with a Filemaker client.

Creating new layouts brings up a new stencil menu (Computer, Touch or printer).

Still in Layout mode you will notice some new objects: the theme picker and the field picker.

The Theme Picker contains a few new themes, but more importantly an ‘Import themes’ button.

Themes (or CSS) are no longer a black box that can only be manipulated by clever hacking, it is open to all and you can modify, create and import themes from other Filemaker files.

The field picker allows you to select a group of fields and add them either horizontally or vertically, with or without labels and place them nicely on your layouts.

Next, when we look at the Format menu we can see that in the portal setup there are two new options:

‘Use alternate row state’ and ‘Use active row state’.

The first replaces the ‘Use alternate row color’ and the second gives us a way to change the look of the selected row (no more conditional formatting and other tricks).

Next we see the Slider Control. This is one of the cool features that mimic the sliders you see on many commercial web sites, where you have slides that keep alternating (mostly promotions).

Another one of these great new features is the Pop over button. As the name suggests, it allows you to pop over a mini-window from the direction of your choice (imagine clicking on a product  and having a pop-over pull a description of the product from Google – limitless possibilities).

The Charts got enhanced but I won’t go into that in this article.

Going over to the Inspector we notice a brand new tab called ‘Styles’. You can now assign styles to multiple objects and have them all change across layouts with a single change (say your clients wants you to use Tahoma 14 instead of Tahoma 16). This can be a real time-saver on larger projects.

What else….

Ah, finally we get ‘Effects’ – for those who miss the old ‘engrave’ and ‘emboss’ styling, you are getting them back with a huge bonus : granular control over shadows and cell padding.

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‘Hide object when’ (in the Inspector) does exactly that, it hides objects.

This is a big one too, the ability to completely hide an object under certain conditions without having to resort to sorcery and tricks. A step towards object oriented programming?

Mobile devices got their share of innovations too:

Script triggers such as ‘OnLayoutSizeChange’ and ‘OnGestureTap’ give us the tools to manage displays when devices are rotated or tapped  (I see a lot of potential creativity with this one).

Customized keyboards on iOS let us choose now which keyboard to pop-up (email specific, numeric, phone etc.)

Direct barcode scanning, cameras and signature captures are welcome features.

The old double row field pop-up when a field was selected on iOS was fixed thank goodness.

The 3 pixels on the left in the list view were removed.

Some new script steps that I will let you play around with:

–          Perform Script on Server (Huge!)

–          Set script animation

–          Close pop-over

–          Upload to Filemaker Server

–          Refresh Object (a big one too– thanks Filemaker!)

And there are some new functions. To name a few:

–          GetNthRecord

–          Base64DecodeEncode

–          Get(NetworkType)

–          Get(TriggerGestureInf)

–          Get(WindowOrientation)

–          Get(ScriptAnimationState)

HTTP POST is now supported and SQL got a couple of new keywords (FETCH FIRST and OFFSET).

The WebDirect engine that generates web pages on the fly with all the fancy bells and whistles (such as pop-over and slide controls) is really cool. Take into account that you need a beefy server and you are limited to the number of users that can be supported (I believe it’s 50, but it really depends on how you created your layouts). Basically, if you don’t keep it simple it won’t be usable.

The Java interface on the server has been removed! Good riddance and Hello to the new web interface with additional stats…

You can now use a single SSL certificate for both the FM server and the web server.

Oh, another huge thing: you can now drop files directly into your browser’s container field.

Undoing and redoing changes to layouts after they were saved is now possible as is adding a background image to a layout.

Data encryption has been bumped up to AES256 bits and is available on the actual FMP12 files (so if you lose your iPad with sensitive info – you don’t have to feel sooo bad).

Filemaker licensing has radically changed but I won’t get into that here, maybe in the next blog.

Finally, a few observations:

You can open and work on Filemaker 12 files in 13 and use some of the cool new features such as shading and padding (probably anything that is CSS related) and the field picker and still go back to Filemaker 12 (I’m sure it’s not ‘recommended’ but it seems to work).

You can’t create a new FM13 file and go back to 12.

It looks like the file format hasn’t changed (both fmp12) but when creating a Filemaker 13 file it probably gets something extra that stops it from opening in 12.

All the FM12 files I tried to open in FM13 seemed to open perfectly.

I suspect there won’t be any significant speed changes but I haven’t had time to test it, so any input on that would be great…

I think that roughly covers the main new features and I’m sure I missed some, so you are welcome to comment.

 

Note: no databases were harmed while writing this article