I'm still on Filemaker 17 and was surprised when looking at a colleague's computer to see that Filemaker 17 doesn't support Windows Emoji's, and wondering if that's been fixed in Filemaker 18 or 19? I've been holding off on upgrading due to the hassle of remotely installing, and also because other than the While statement, it doesn't seem that FM 18 or 19 have any real benefits, but this might push me over if one of them supports Windows Emoji...

On 6/10/2020 at 1:35 PM, JasonMark said:

it doesn't seem that FM 18 or 19 have any real benefits,

 

19 is a game changer with how it allows developers to use JavaScript.  That is going to significantly change how solutions are architected going forward.  So don't miss the boat on that one.

Bummer about Emojis. I'm assuming it's legacy and would be significant to fix... :*(

 

RE: Javascript and 19

Since *I* don't know Javascript very well, it probably won't affect our system over the next year.

How stable is it? Is it faster or slower than 17 for basic operations? If it's the same speed or faster and super stable I'll probably upgrade over the summer while school is out since I can get my hands on everyone's machines that way, otherwise I'll probably wait until summer 2020.

Stable?  It's very stable because it uses the browser's engine to run the JS. It's been possible since FM14 and has become more and more mainstream since then.  That's why there have been dedicated full-day training sessions at the last few devcons.  It's why we have been pushing our devs to learn the basics of JS for years now. 19 makes it significantly simpler in its implementation and makes it work flawlessly on WebDirect as well.

Faster or slower?  For purely computational stuff it is magnitudes faster.  Like with anything, it's all about picking the right thing at the right time.  There are two big reasons for using it:

- for UI/USX and data visualizations; to do things that are otherwise not possible with the other native layout widgets

- for computation stuff (math, text processing,...).  Here it is much faster than most of what you can achieve with say a traditional looping script.

Awesome! Then I'll check it out.  I'm just getting back into Filemaker... before this the last version I used was 12, and for years whenever they had a new release it tended to be buggy (crashes, etc.) and so I always regretted upgrading within the first 6 months when they had a new major Filemaker release.

In case you missed it:

https://support.claris.com/s/article/New-Claris-support-policy?language=en_US

If you wait 6 months you will be at least one more version behind...  Going forward expect new features every 3 months instead of every 12 months.

Thanks for this. If 17 is going to end of life I really need to upgrade. Our school's IT department has everything locked down, so staff can't even update to the latest version themselves.

Sorry to bug you again, but if I upgrade my server to 19, will everyone who's on 17 loose access until they upgrade? Same question for people who use Filemaker Go Mobile and have Filemaker Go 17 or 18.

Thanks