Terra Software Corporation

There are many ways  to build a solution in FileMaker, especially moving forward into FileMaker 7, 8, 8.5 and 9.0. Over the past few months we have been seeing more and more requests for repairs on other developers work, or to add on to an existing solution. FileMaker is such a powerful tool that there is not necessarily always one way to build a database, that being said there are many ways not to do things. 

I think the most common mistake of the general FileMaker Developer community is the coding into a corner scenario, I have been there myself and it is a real pain to fix sometimes. It is always best to really plan things out and have a good design that is forward thinking; ideally a development template to be the foundation. If the developer fails to plan things out you will often find yourself having to rebuild or replace entire systems. Now at some point in time most database solutions do require significant rewrite or complete rebuilds. Without a good development plan or blue print to reference the rewrite or rebuild can be quite time consuming and expensive. So my point is plan, plan, plan.. the extra time it takes to do so is worth its weight in any commodity.

As we progress through 2008 I think we are all going to see a significant increase in the use of the internet and web browser based applications. Granted the average web browser based application is not quite at the same level as applications such as FileMaker; at least not without significant development. We will see a number of very cool applications coming to market through the course of the year, even Terra Software will be releasing 2 applications but for the moment in the spirit of covert marketing we are taking the "Cloverfield" approach until it is time to unleash each product upon the world. 

So as we see the increased use of the web browser does this mean the end of the client based database application ? Absolutely not, at least not right away, the hardware manufacturers will first need to provide hardware that is cheap enough to encourage web based application usage at its highest level. Further ISP's will need to become even faster and cheaper.. it will happen. Further it will require further influence by the upstart generations to encourage there vendors and employers to move toward web 2.0 and possibly web 3.0 (does not truly exist...YET!) in there thinking.

Apple always brings out great products but this time around Leopard seems to have left the cage slightly earlier than it should have. From my own personal experience, Leopard is a really great OS and is much faster than Tiger 10.4.X The downside of my experience has been that key applications for my use have all had problems. FileMaker 9 was not compatible but with the release of FMP 9v2 about 1 week after the release of Leopard FileMaker 9 is stable and fast. Further Parallels which is a VM (Virtual Machine) technology allowing you to run other operating systems on your Intel Mac is not ready for Leopard. Parallels has indicated they are working on a Leopard compatible version and should be out before the end of November 2007. The worst and personally sucked the most for me is the fact that Apples Boot Camp 2.0 fails to be stable I found the beta to be more stable and more reliable so far. The problem I ran into with Apple's Boot Camp 2.0 is that as soon as the Drivers were updated in the Boot Camp partition, the login to windows will reboot into Mac OSX 10.5 as soon as the desktop in windows is established. Now i of course immediately called Apple Tech support but there best response was that it is a windows problem. That being said I was forced to wipe out the Windows partition and start all over.. low and behold the exact same problem occurred with a fresh install. Therefore I have been forced to move my Parallels and Boot Camp to another Intel Mac which is still running Tiger 10.4.10

Leopard is a great OS and has some real power behind it, though it needs some clean up here and there, I look forward to the coming updates.

P.S. I am using Leopard on the Mac side daily and still using Windows XP SP2 on the PC side