11 of 30 customers found the following review helpful:
 Only for recipe or CD collections databases, 2004-04-06
I purchased and installed this FileMaker Developer product and ran into a brick wall, that precludes its use as a serious development tool. FileMaker Pro suffers from the same deficiencies. My real rating is 0 stars. Filemaker does not use tab controls. It gets around this shortcoming by requiring that a separate layout be designed for each tab. Importantly this is not just for the information on the tab, BUT FOR THE WHOLE COTTON-PICKIN layout!!! Then when a user clicks on the tab "button", a new layout is repainted over the old. Even though Filemaker provides the ability to copy a form, I have found that the repainted forms "jump" and give an entirely unsatisfactory visual experience. Like watching a web form flicker repaint over a slow dial up connection. Filemaker appears to be a maintenance nightmare. If you have a layout with header information and with a five tab area, and you wish to change the header information (field width, color, etc.) you have to change it five times on each layout! I thought the purpose of databases was to normalize information, that is to reduce redundancy in data storage. Filemaker may reduce this redunduncy, but it it adds it back in spades when it comes to application development! The screen flicker caused by full screen repaints and the large number of forms required to accomodated simple tab displays makes this a no brainer. Filemaker is fine for your receipe or CD collection database, but forget about using it for serious development.
|
Amazon Sales Rank:#4213