There are a large number of business tools built for Filemaker, and this is what I had in mind when I made my comments about 'applications' built to run on a proprietary database, and to be honest those tools would probably be more suitable for anyone looking for a multi-user envronment and wanting to building up a massive database.

I'm all for open and free systems such as mysql and anyone with the technical knowledge and time to build their own custom database would do well to look at that option.

Organise is aimed at those who wish to download a small, inexpensive application, double-click the applications icon and start working.

I'd dispute that Organise is slowed up by its choice of file format. What is a mysql database if not a file on a hard drive? When you're using Organise, your data is stored in memory - file operations only occur when changes need to be saved, which incidentally is handled by another thread. I suggest that these principles are exactly the same when using sql.

Note that all of the data (other than attachments which are not stored in the database file) is plain text which takes up a negligable amount of memory / hard drive space. Even if a user manages to get their data into megabytes rather than kilobytes, a meg is still nothing in today's terms.

I'm going to be absolutely honest and say that if scrolling through very long lists gets sluggish (which none of my registered users has reported) then it's more likely to be down to my sort routines or the fact that I've used Java-Cocoa rather than Obj-C. Version 2 is already underway which is a complete rewrite in Obj-C. (I should point out to anyone interested in registering, that a licence key will be good for all future versions regardless of price increases!)

To answer your last point, migrating data to a different system - you'll see that all tables can be exported to csv. In my experience, importing data into tabes in a proprietary database from a csv file is a piece of cake.

Thank you for your points. I welcome the chance to discuss these things.

It's always good to be able to give some concrete piece of advice if you find an app lacking some feature you miss. So here you go with some database-related tips: www.exist-db.org, a free open source native XML db in Java, www.db4o.com (a new Java-based db engine for objects) and www.enterpisedb.com/downloads.do, a very scalable version of PostgreSQL, the world's best open source db!

The great thing to store app data in accessible XML files is that your app becomes scriptable in the sense that you can process the data further by using Ruby or Perl XML parsers (see for example www.twigxml.com or xmltwig) or by such command line tools as xmlstar.sf.net. I 'm really hoping that this would become a trend (for yet another app that follows this trend see InforMac).

An XML parser written in Ruby is rexml: www.germane-software.com/software/rexml/. And there are of course more such tools available for Mac OS X (just search for "XML" and the like here or at Hyperjeffs OS X page)!