FM 12 Serious interface problems

[Donald R Kleinschmidt]

Two particular deal-breakers:

One,

Most of our layouts contain many hundreds of stacked objects. When in layout mode we can no longer click in the center of transparent objects to get to objects underneath. We can only select the frontmost object, transparent or not. I can't imagine what this will do do our productivity.

Two,

We use conditional formatting extensively. In one case we highlight a portal row, passing the record id as a parameter from a button calling a navigation script. We conditionally format the highlight on that particular record. In v. 11, this takes about .33 second, even with loaded portals.

In v 12, we clocked this same script at just over two seconds, with only three records in the portal, making it essentially unusable.

To say the least, we are very concerned.

(We develop on MacBook Pros v 10.6.8)

[marianco]

Looks like conditional formatting is very very slow.

Apparently, as I understand it, Filemaker switched to an HTML/CSS format for describing objects. The problem is that creates a lot more code to parse the same objects in Filemaker Pro 12 than Filemaker Pro 11, slowing everything down.

Despite having a top-of-the-line MacBook Pro i7 with 16 Gigs RAM and a SSD drive, Filemaker seems to take up more CPU cycles in FM 12 than in FM 11.

I hope Filemaker can come up with a way to compile this code. It is possible since Safari uses a javascript compiler to greatly speed things up.