Painfully Slow Layout Designing in 7/8 vs. 6 ??

[LuckMan212]

Hi folks, I'm a fairly skilled FMP6 developer running Windows XP. I recently downloaded the trial version of 8.0 (skipped the v7 series completely-hah!) to see what all the hoopla was about and I must say there do seem to be some nice features most notably built in PDF support.

HOWEVER.. one thing that hit me right away was how SLOW the layout mode has become. I am very fast with the mouse+keyboard and like to move,resize and drag things around on layouts quickly. With 6.0 this was fine, things were snappy and immediate.

With 8.0, I find there is a VERY noticable "lag" between when I grab an object and start to drag it and when it actually starts moving. Also there is less "smoothness" to the dragging and I find it harder to position objects with 1-pixel precision due to this slowness.

Overall the layout mode is just much less natural feeling to me, has anyone else experienced this? For kicks I installed v7 Developer which I had purchased but never used and noticed the same problem so it seems to have carried forward from that edition. I was told by my Mac buddy that on the Mac he did not notice this issue-- so maybe its a PC-only problem?

Interested in some feedback. Thanks!

[Sergeant Ron]

Sorry to tell you this, but you probably need a better video card. 64mb at least. FM 7 and 8 definately require more video memory for designing layouts. How much memory is currently on your video card?

[LuckMan212]

I dont think thats the issue, I am using a 128mb Geforce 6600GT pci-express video card. Should be more than sufficient for designing FMP layouts!

[Kent Searight]

Hmmm, I run FM7 and 8 on Windows and Mac and I don't notice any slowness in layout mode. And I too can get moving pretty fast with objects in layout mode.

Using:

2.66GHz Pentium4, Win XP Pro, 128Mb video card

533MHz Mac G4, OS Tiger

I don't know what the cause is but I really don't think the FM7 & 8 applications are the culprit.

[neocode:david]

I found the original FM7 on the PC to be painfully slow for layouts as well - I was continually rubber-banding. Patching it seemed to help, and I changed to a faster computer, so it's managable now.

I'm running FM8 now and I find the slowness in layout mode tolerable, but it's certainly not a zippy as FM6.

I'm running Athlon 1800+ w/ 1 GB of RAM and a built-in 128 MB nVidia graphics chip. IMHO requiring a good graphics card for FM development is pretty ridiculous.

Edited December 27, 2005 by Guest

[flapjacks]

I went from 5.5 to 7 and I don't see a difference. I develope mainly on my laptop (AMD Sempron). I also use just about everything else in the office at times. Maybe I'm just used to windows.

John

[Sergeant Ron]

System Requiremets for Windows: not sure if this will help:

http://www.filemaker.com/products/fmp/tech_specs.html

I've found that Pentium 4 and 512mb Ram makes a big difference (Also the more video RAM the better).

[neocode:david]

Well, my system is well above the minimum requirements - I'd hate to try running it with a PIII 500 w/ 256 MB of RAM.

I'm surprised that people are saying they don't notice any lag. When I grab a field and drag it, there's a short pause between the action and the dragging "outline" actually moving, then another pause between releasing the mouse button and the field actually moving.

Anyway, like I said, I'm used to it now - but I'd still love to see it improved. ;)

Edited December 29, 2005 by Guest

[LuckMan212]

neocode:david -- exactly! that's what I was trying to explain. It's frustrating. I have a very fast computer and I'm not sure why this slowed down so much vs. 6.x but even after using it for awhile I just can't seem to get used to how sluggish it feels. I wish they would improve this..... sigh

[LuckMan212]

I am sad to see that years later and several versions later, and since I have even upgraded to an even faster dual-core C2D computer and a new video card and FMP 9.0v2 the layout designing is still feeling very sluggish and un-responsive to me. I have never been able to get used to it and positioning finely objects is very difficult vs. 6.0 and prior versions. B)

[Lee Smith]

Maybe I don't have a clear understanding of what you mean by sluggish. Having used every version of FileMaker Pro, since 1980, I can't remember when I would have described to it as Sluggish.

However, I have always developed it on a Macintosh, but that shouldn't make any difference.

Lee

[117Alan]

Hi

Do you think perhaps it runs slowly because it is the trial version, and therefore perhaps not a complete genuine version?

Alan