20 Years of MBS Plugin

16 hours ago16 hr

Our MBS Plugin started 20 years ago with a release 1.0 in 2006. We didn't expect this to be such a big part of our lives, but how did we get started?

A bit of history

Even back in 2001 when I just started to work on my first plugins for REALbasic, I have emails from people like Todd Geist looking for someone to help write a FileMaker plugin. In the next years we saw similar requests from Nils Waldherr, Ralf Sander and others. In 2003 I got the copy of the FMP SDK, but I didn't get warm with it. In 2004 I got more inquiries from Chris Griffin, Tony Tanevski and even someone named Wim Decorte asking for a FileMaker integration.

In 2006 I saw Todd Geist asking again for help with an Xcode project. Claris released version 7 with a newer and better SDK. Thanks to Markus Herter for pointing me to the new FileMaker SDK. The discussion with Todd got productive with a list of desired functions and I started to build an Xcode project. Todd showed some plugin functions at a Claris DevCon and we had the first people interested to try the plugin. You can still see the list of 1.0 functions here and a copy of the announcement here.

Thanks to everyone pushing me to the right direction!

Some steps on the way:

2006 - Version 1.0 released

2011 - First visit to FileMaker Konferenz in Hamburg, Germany as sponsor presenting the MBS Plugin.

2012 - Started syntax coloring after getting the idea at the 2012 Konferenz in Salzburg and got awarded the an FMM Award there.

2013 - First booth at a FileMaker DevCon in San Diego

2016 - Second FMM Award

2017 - 5000 Functions

2018 - Innovation Award Winner at DevCon in Texas

2020 - 20 Years party of our company.

2024 - First flight on the other side to down-under and visit FileMaker conference in Australia

2025 - 25 Years party of our company

2026 - 20 Years of MBS Plugin

Birthday Sale

If you haven't yet the luck to get a MBS Plugin license, you can order one this month with a 20% discount. Use coupon code Birthday at checkout in the web shop. The discount must show up in the shopping cart before you finish the order. We can't apply a coupon retroactive after the order was sent.

Future

We expect to continue to make the plugin far into the future. As long as our clients have challenges and we can help with new functionality, we will continue to add more features. The intention was not to add as much functions as possible, but we will nevertheless soon reach 8000 in the statistics. While we have a few things on the road map, this changes quickly with new suggestions coming in. Please let us know if you have ideas for new functionalities.