The templates out of the gate are well built, have a nice UI and give you the freedom to make them yours easily. The number one pro in my opinion is the ease in which you can start using Filemaker Databases. I've been a user of Filemaker on and off since it's early days as a Claris product. Also, real constraints far data calls from the UI are not possible, you always have to call the full data from the UI. Why? It is possible to make any relation, but the quantity of relations you need and the complexity (usually chaos) that comes with is huge. For nowadays the web design moved to dynamic UI where less is more, if you want an interface to be easy to read and understand, you really need to show less data at the same time, for that you need dynamic and flexible UI, which is not possible to build with Filemaker.ī) Data access/constraint: relations in the database are made in a way (classic relations between tables) that while is intuitive and easy to understand, is very difficult and limited for big and complex relations. In a simple interface with only a few fields, you can handle it easily, but for complex/flexible UI, it becomes a nightmare with a lot of data that you cannot show dynamically.ġ0 years ago it was all that was out there, and therefore the CRM UI were those big messy layouts with a lot of data. Is possible to hide elements of course, but not to adapt the behavior for the rest of the elements. When a layout (page) needs to have a dynamic interface, which means conditionals for show/hide elements and adapt the rest of the elements, you just can't. You only can build scripts and crazy relations as workarounds to simulate a kind of constraint on the layouts, but that is not efficient at all for developing and you reach the limitation in the UI soon.įilemaker a decade ago was like a mule to plow the field in the 18th century, powerful and efficient, and nowadays it is still basically the same mule, just that the ecosystem possibilities and necessities changed.Ī) UI: the interface engine is completely outdated for a modern app, is not that you can't build beautiful UI, you can, as far it does not require real responsiveness and conditionals. If you have 40k records in a table, you cannot easily allow in a page, search or element just to show a part of those records. There are privacy settings for the database of course, but the problem is that when building the UI you cannot make lists, search, and in short, any access to the records, to be really constrained by different criteria. Also the data constrain is a problem when you are building a complex app that requires either internal or external users, to access different data in a clean and easy way. But as the world is changing to web and dynamic UI, Filemaker has not made any step on this, and is getting completely outdated. It was really great few years ago, powerful and clean for database, easy enough to build the interface. Great for database and scripts, a dinosaur for a modern app with complex data relation Quick and easy communication with the translators without having to look up their phone numbers all the time. Also wrote an SMS/texting script (which used Envaya SMS on an android phone), allowing easy contact with the translators from within the Project Management database. There were many of such special functions that was offloaded to Filemaker scripts. Thus reducing several hours of (manual) labor per project to mere seconds. I wrote a parser in Filemaker that parsed the Trados Project data file, which contained all the data anyway. This was previously a manual process and calculation which took more than an hour to gather and process. Importing Trados project translation data the project management database, allowing the invoicing, translator payments and project data to be easily calculated. The database(s) handles everything from employees, customers, timesheets, project management, invoicing, subletting workstations (they also ran a small office hotel).Ī lot of functions were built into the databases to offload a lot of manual tasks to the scripts. Fantastic prototyping and database systemĪt my old job at a translation company, I built an entire "company management system" from scratch over the course of 10 years.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |