Parts of the ageing interface (such as the new forms) have been dragged into this decade but there is still much to dislike if you are used to modern Mac applications. Viewing your data in a table is particularly slow and clunky, and unintuitive. Undo is still inconsistent. Here are a few questions and comments I have sent to Filemaker after using the trial for a while:


Thank you for making Filemaker Pro 12 available for trial. I have tested almost every version since I owned Filemaker Pro 7, always hoping that the software would develop to better support my needs and expectations. The news that you were moving on from the Mac OS 7-style interface elements was a relief, and there are some good themes which show what style and elegance can now be achieved. Unfortunately, table view doesn't seem to have been updated much over the years. It would be good if you could make table view work as smoothly and look as elegant as the similar table interfaces in Bento, Numbers or iTunes. Anyway, here are some other questions/feedback, to which you are welcome to reply if you think you can help me:

If I import a spreadsheet and end up with a bunch of extra rows, how do I select multiple rows (entries) and delete them?

I still can't copy data easily from a table by selecting with the cursor as if you were using spreadsheet. I appreciate that this is not what databases are for, but it would be useful, just like it is in Bento.

When viewing a large table, is it possible to 'freeze' columns so that I can see at least my first column, even as a scroll horizontally to view other columns?

I tried making a database with a container for files. Firstly, how do I then access those attachments? It added them but apart from the thumbnail there didn't seem to be a way to view them (no quickview) let alone open them. Also, the check box for referenced file was never functional, so adding a movie, say, increased the size of my database by 2 GB!

Why is horizontal and vertical scrolling of a database in list view on a fairly recent MBP so clunky? Why can't you optimise the software to scroll smoothly, or at least with a refresh rate that is faster than 0.5 s?

When I resize the columns in table view how come the contents aren't updated dynamically like in Bento and Numbers? And despite the lack of dynamic updating of the headers and content, resizing a column is still hampered by an incredibly slow refresh rate. Seriously, it's this underlying clunkiness that suggests that some very fundamental things have not changed since the last version I used (fm7) or before. I try every update (with optimism) and I find your repetitive claims of a modernised interface are always exaggerated.

Perhaps I'm not your Filemaker Pro customer, although as a teacher/manager in a small school, I maintain many large databases in Excel. I would love to manage this data properly in a database but as a Mac user I don't have a lot of choice unless I go down the VM route. If Filemaker Pro is never likely to shed its legacy roots and offer the features I want, can't you just add reports and non-ugly themes to Bento or release a Mac/iOS/online Bento Pro?

Has Netnewswire stopped working with iWeb feeds? And those 'search feeds' I set up in the original Netnewswire - do they still work? (Apparently not for me).

Any chance the pre-Google functionality will return in full?

I just updated as prompted and now I'm getting no sound (and no recordings either, even though it goes through the motions). So no iPod content for me this week...

I tried this and the poor quality of the images makes them unusable.

I tried exporting png and tiff files and the size was pointlessly small. How come you can control the thumbnail size but not the actual image size?!

Doesn't work for me. Brings system to a crawl due to massive memory usage.

"Could not save document - there was an error"

TubeTV is great - I've had it for a while.

I recently installed the Safari 4 beta and I don't seem to get any sound with my movies.

Is there a connection here? (Obviously if there is, it's my problem, but I thought someone would like to know).