How can FMP tables be accessed (read, write) without running FMP? Preferably with Cocoa.

Any text editor will view the file - but format will not be very useful, and writing to the file with application other than FMP will be dangerous while it is in .fp5 proprietary format.

Better will be to export data to file as delimited text etc, where you can then open it in many other applications. Then if you write the changes to the data you still can import it back to the FM records.

There are many export file format options to choose.

Best of all might be to script the export and import to happen when you close and open the FM file, so when FM is open you use FM to access data, but when it is closed data is accessible as text.

This is akin to asking how to access Oracle files or SQLServer files without running those apps. It is possible, but not easy and generally pretty dangerous.

Why not just run Filemaker and open the databases?

On the topic, anyone want to start a FileMaker clone that doesn't suck?

Would be enough if you incorporated some of AppleWorks' features on the text and layout side, add some rollovers and interactivity, a text-based script-editor and finally full scriptability an all 3 platforms ....