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Yeah, I wouldn't mind people's opinions of this. Personally, I think I prefer Filemaker due to the ability to script things. Kind of a hobby of mine.

Sci, you misread me, again. And your metaphor is flawed.

Basically Pages kicks Word's butt at page layout and Keynote creates nicer looking and more reproducible (aka: works on other machines) presentations.

NAG wrote:

Basically Pages kicks Word's butt at page layout and Keynote creates nicer looking and more reproducible (aka: works on other machines) presentations.

Easily proving the old adage that sometimes less is more. I found sometimes all the thing possible in FileMaker were detrimental to the people who need a database manager but not necessarily on with the power FileMaker afforded. One tended to overdo the situation a little or not do all the things they want with it due to the difficulty of figuring things out sometimes.

Yeah I just was noticing that myself. Hopefully that's one of the improvements in the next major revision. Then again it could also be something they plan to address on the FileMaker end by allowing it to simply read and possibly save to Bento format.

I've no problem with that as long as some real compatibility solutions happen before too long.

This question of Filemaker compatibility is a complicated one, as always with databases. A relational database consists of both data sets and relationships between data sets. (And also, at least in the case of Filemaker, scripts — i.e. automated actions which use relationships to change data sets.)

In my experience (admittedly, limited to Filemaker, the old Palm handheld, the Mac address book, etc.), data can generally be exported and transferred between database apps fairly easily--if necessary as text files separated by tabs or commas (CSV).

By contrast, it's almost never possible to translate an entire database (that is, the data sets and all the relationships between them) from one database app to another. I'd like to be proven wrong about this, but it's my impression that when a client wants to shift from, say, Microsoft Access to Filemaker, they need to rebuild the database (all the fields and relationships) from scratch, then import the actual data as a final step. I'm not sure why this is the case, but I think it has to do with fundamental differences in the basic architecture. Indeed, I suspect that database engineers often wind up redesigning a database at least to some extent during such a conversion, to take into account differences of architecture.

Such differences can even be a problem when upgrading to a new version. I recall reading on a Filemaker user forum that FM6 users were often better off rebuilding from scratch when they upgraded to FM7, as glitches tended to interfere with performance when a FM6 database was opened and run in FM7.

So we shouldn't be surprised that Bento and FM aren't interoperable. I suspect that, to make them interoperable, the developers would have had to build Bento on an FM foundation, limiting the extent to which Bento could be a product which was both distinct from and easier to use than Filemaker.

Last edited by henebry (2008-02-01 8:36 am)