Software created for FileMaker developer is never live on to be a big draw on the Macworld Expo show storey — well , it is for FileMaker developers , I suppose , but the general world is probable to just keeping walk past the cubicle . And that ’s a disgrace , really , because I saw some passably impressive things from the developer who set up store in the FileMaker Pavilion , a mathematical group of kiosks just off to the side ofFileMaker ’s bombastic displayon the show floor .
Dr. Ron Smith is a Fayetteville , Ga. , baby doctor who created a FileMaker - based paperless medical selective information system of rules for his own exercise a few yr ago . Now he betray the programme , PaperCutProto other primary forethought physicians . Another developer , Christian James , was making its Macworld Expo debut to show of its PayGo SP decimal point - of - cut-rate sale software for FileMaker . It had one of the more cagy name for a feature of speech that I saw all week — the customizable aspect of PayGo are dubbedOpenSortabecause they ’re “ sorta ” open generator . And . Com Solutions — which was on paw to show off thelatest reading of FMProMigrator softwarefor migrating FileMaker Pro databases to MySQL , SQL Server , Access and other formats — was also showcasing software from another FileMaker developer , Actual Technologies . That product , Actual ODBC Driver for Microsoft Access , lets OS X users meaning data from Access databases using either FileMaker Pro or Excel . It sounds like an ideal way for Mac substance abuser in multi - platform scene to snaffle Access data quickly and easily .
But the FileMaker - based product that impressed me the most at Expo was a database analysis tool called Inspector fromFM : link . Sold and supported by fellow FileMaker developerBeezwax Datatools , Inspector analyse a FileMaker database ’s metadata , highlight problem areas in a visually arresting way — namely a scarlet dot . Hover over one of those dots , and a tooltip shows you what the problem is .
Inspector ’s interface is so square , it almost makes me think I could sit down and debug a complex FileMaker database with only the psychoanalysis puppet as my template . I can only imagine how muscular and effective it would be in the hand of someone with more database competence than myself .
