Why Filemaker Still Uses the MDI window on PC?

[John Wallace]

I've been developing Filemaker solutions for years now. I started on the Windows platform, but for since FM7 have been almost exclusively developing for the Mac. 

 

An old client recently contacted me and asked if I would update their old FM6 solution to FM13 and also put the solution on their ipads. 

 

It was quite a job! I hadn't looked at that code for years and my code was messy and not well documented! Oh well. Haha. 

 

But I was quite shocked and disappointed to find that Filemaker on Windows still uses the MDI window and that all Filemaker windows exist INSIDE that one application window. Super frustrating! My client uses two screens and was hoping to have two separate windows open - one on each screen. And as far as I can see, the only solution is to drag the MDI window across both screens. The client hates it! And so do I! On my macs it works beautifully. But on their Windows 7 machines it looks terrible. 

 

Why does Filemaker still use the MDI interface? Why not make the Windows version and Mac version behave in the same way? Surely it's possible! 

[Wim Decorte]

Deep sigh.... welcome to the party

 

It is what it is I guess but know that this is a very lively conversation with FMI.

oh, and the other message is to always test first on the target OS before giving it to the client so that you know exactly what you are walking into and can steer the conversation instead of having to show platform-frustration in front of the customer

[John Wallace]

Deep sigh, huh? Oh well. Me too!  

 

I looked online and this has been a feature request since version 7 or 8! 

 

And good call about testing on the target OS! 

 

Do you know of any work around? If I could run several instances of Filemaker on the PC I guess I could get it to work that way, but that doesn't seem to work either! 

 

You think FMI will fix this for us? Or is it a lost cause? 

 

Thanks for the input. JW

[Josh Ormond]

Technically FM is MDI on OSX also. OSX just handles it differently.

 

Making the conversion from MDI to SDI, may not be the answer. Things work a little differently. I have seen in the past applications that basically hide the enclosing application window, and free the file windows. That would be nice. I do hope they make the adjustment. In the meantime, I resort to sizing the file window to just 1 px short of the application window size. Its not perfect, but it works, for most things.

[hbrendel]

I looked online and this has been a feature request since version 7 or 8!

On my wishlist this has been nr 1 feature request since FM moved to Windows. FM 2. 1992.

[Ezz]

Ho Hum... ran into this as well... In pre-design meetings a required feature of the application was to have one desktop windows pc running the database in an office and another tv/panel screen linked off that desktop machine as status screen for employees in a workshop... looking forward to 2022

 

I read somewhere that if buy Pro and Pro Advanced that they run as separate apps on the same windows machine so this was a solution... get the client to buy another copy of FM.

 

Alternatively a run time solution will open in its own separate window also so in some cases this may be a solution to get dual screens happening.

 

In this case as the alternate display was to show status information only (read only) any other ODBC link to the FM database could achieve it also... such as MS Access they already had.