FileMaker 8 Impressions!

[Heathbo]

Well I downloaded the 30 trial and I can say HOLY ****. Sorry for the language. What can I say, FINALLY mouse wheel movement. That alone is enough for me. The tabbed tool is awesome. I can totally see myself consolidating layouts now. Finally Align is now in the tool bar or a tear off window. Autofill is awesome, and no work to set it up. Email support ABOUT TIME! Calendar pop up is cool. Auto spell check is nice. NO Flash improvements BUMMER! I have only had this for an hour so I'm still going through it. I can't wait to download FM Pro 8 Advanced Demo so I can play with tooltips.

Anybody else download the demo. If so what do you think?

[Zero Tolerence]

I got it here at Devcon and have been playing around with it a bit. One question I would like to ask anyone with a little spare time is to see if they did anything with Instant Web Publishing. One of the hugest drawbacks of IWP in my opinion was that list mode only let you see 5 records, anyone know if this has been fixed/changed? Other than that, I've been having a lot of fun with it, quite a few interesting things you can do, although most of the stuff they showed us at the demo requires the "Advanced" version (Copy and pasting tables, c & p script steps from one script to another) I'll hopefully end up with a copy of Advanced before I leave here. Very exciting stuff.

[RalphL]

That was fixed in FMP 7, the latest revsion allows up to 20 lines.

[AnFrusch@pepp]

I tried FM pro 8 trial today..

I'm very impressed by this version.

there are many thing very useful in my opinion.

Script variable is one of 'em.. variable lets you assign a dynamic name to a PDF created directly from filemaker and attach the same file to an e-mail.. this is amazing to me! No more plug-in to do that, and it seems it works even better!

FileMaker seems to be faster than all the other previous versions, drop down menus are faster too.

Let's see what filemaker server 8 advanced can do now!

:

[Fenton]

I am still waiting for the export (import) dialogs to be dynamically scriptable. It is curious that they've added a Get ( DesktopPath ), but no way to use it within an export path. I hope they are moving in that direction, as being able to dynamically target the desktop would eliminate the need for 3rd-party tools for basic file manipulation.

It is a great upgrade though. I will post more about my impressions, but in the FileMaker 8 forum. Should we move this thread there?

[Heathbo]

Where is the FileMaker 8 forum?

[Ocean West]

Use this forum for now we will organize things once we get some needed rest :zzz:

[VICH]

question....how is the mouse wheel support different than how it has been?

[Zero Tolerence]

In a field with a scroll bar, there was no wheel support before.

[VICH]

is that the only thing different because i was watching the demo video on the fm website and it showed it scrolling through records...and i've always been able to do that....

[Sire]

You can dynamically create file names and file paths for import and export by using local and global variables.

[Heathbo]

There was no scrolling in FileMaker 7 on the Mac.

[VICH]

oh ok that makes more sense now

[Heathbo]

Now that its been out for a month, what is everyone's impression?

[slbr549]

My impression of FM8 is beyond excellent. So many of the features I didn't know I wanted until I saw them. My users are ecstatic over the pdf and excel functionality. It's hard for me to say what is my absolute favorite, but the copy and paste of script steps is right up there....

[Ted S]

All things considered, I'm happy with the v8 release.

The tab control object needs more options like vertically oriented tabs and multi-row tabs but in its current shape it's still pretty good.

I'm liking the red underlining of misspelled words feature way more than I thought I would. Tool tips are great. Popup calendar is very nice although way overdue. I have yet to use the Excel and PDF creators much but I know they will be very handy.

Probably the biggest missing piece remains the inability to trigger scripts based on events. Users have been asking for this for a long time and I wouldn't be surprised to see it in the next release. I was surprised it wasn't in v8.

One last thing I would like to see is easier and more complete integration with other applications (read Microsoft).

I'm satisfied and enjoying working with the new tool.

[mr_vodka]

The red underline for spell check is nice but I wish I could turn it off for specific fields. Some of my hidden fields with white color text when holding a blank value comes up with the red dots when the user clicks into it. (popup value lists)

Also defintely eventscripts is needed.

Other than that, I have been very happy with FM8. I thought that it would just bring some new bells and whistles, but it way exceeded my expecatation.

;)

[Reed]

I agree that it would be nice if the spell checking was a field behavior option in layout mode, so it could be used only when appropriate.

Scripted navigation of tabs would be nice too, without the go to field workarounds. It would just be nice if the current tab on each tab set would be remembered during the session, so that switching layouts would not put you back at the default tab upon switching back.

I love the new custom menus and shortcut keys too. This is saving people a ton of time around here with data entry.

I've also noticed that print setups seem to work better with multiple printers now. On my XP box with one laserjet and one dymo, I can set different scripts to print to different printers, regardless of the windows default printer setting. This did not work in 7 w/o a plugin... anyone else have this experience?