Claris Platform: 2021 Vision - your comments

You guys saw the webinar?
The one yesterday was public, so I'm curious on some comments.

First of all: thanks Christian, for reminding us (me) on the German Forum of that webinar.

Honestly I didn't get ANY information out of that webinar. To me it seemed like pure marketing blah blah without any specific information about Filemaker. A blurred roadmap like pointing with your finger to the west. No specific product features, a lot of buzz words. Wasted time for me. Sorry...

7 Likes

Well, I am happy to see they talk about doing the Apple Silicon support finally.

(a) building add-ons a bit more complicated than they suggested the first time around, and (b) distributing add-ons is a whole lot easier and better organised. Not a lot of detail around either (a) nor (b). In any case, it's a bit harder than you think but once you've got your add-on working Claris have a real, commercial marketplace for sales and distribution. That's great.

The rest of the show was them telling us how committed they are to being open and inclusive and how exciting it is to be a part of such a happening, open and inclusive company. Thats really cool - keep up the good work folks.

As far as I understand, they want to provide future add-ons to use CoreML themselves to do tasks. We'll look forward to learn what will be included in the spring release for 2021.

I was under whelmed as well but I did take note when they said they are contracting with Live Code for the Android support. I find this interesting in a few way.

  • FileMaker is willing to partner with Live Code to get the job done sooner I am guessing.
  • I will expect an app that will likely not replace FileMaker Go for me.
  • I tried Live Code a couple years ago and it would not even load my app. I hope they have made progress.

I know a few other things caught my attention enough to break me away from working but I missed a lot too.

There was not many details on Android beside LiveCode as partner.

When talking about Android, what I expect is FileMaker Go for Android, a native app to install and connect to FM Server. Including the Draco engine to have the exact same behavior on the device as on iOS.

What we may get is a SDK to build an android app by converting a FMP file to LiveCode and building a custom android app from that, which may use Data API to connect. But those are two very different things!

And I wonder if LiveCode works well for Claris, they may use it for iOS, too.

1 Like

So the FM-stuff is transformed into LiveCode stuff...

I asked the people at LiveCode wether this transformed code would run on all there other supported platforms which would have meant a possible path to give FM-runtimes to a future life - they said "no".

Thus I suppose they have an agreement with Claris about these matters.

From what I got as information you can't even edit your converted app in LiveCode - not even with a current LiveCode license. Everything is thrown into a black compiler box. Not promissing at all - and not building trust into that solution either.

just 2 cents

2 Likes

same here - it's maybe a language problem (besides of too much work), but I did not get much out

Didn't have time. Is it on YouTube already?

Well said. They repeated what they said before, with the the same slides: FileMaker Core, Connect, FileMaker, etc. There has been one demo . . . hum, made of screen captures.

The roadmap of the past are gone :unamused:.

Right at the beginning I had sound problems: even with the computer audio set to max and trying to crank aout the sound out of my speakers, all I could hear was a very light sound.

Why do Claris insist on doing presentations where we don't learn anything new - even the fact that they work with LiveCode for a solution on Android was already known - with no interesting information and with poor sound ? I just don't get it.

Looks like the partners get more interesting information from Claris, but under NDA. How about communicating with customers ?

I know this looks like rant, but each time Claris 'communicate', the experience is wrong, unfortunately. Are they trying to kill the product ?

5 Likes

I keep watching those as each has a handful of new details in there for me. But all is subject to change and even if a release time is mentioned, it may be delayed for some quarters or cancelled if the implementation gets in trouble.

1 Like

I was happy to hear (I really had problems to understand) that connect will be better glued in some way to FileMaker.

Today, while talking to other fba members, they talled me that connect today is already looking poor compared to other products. I will try to get more infos )-:

1 Like

I used LiveCode for almost 2 years, from Beta through the first version that FileMaker was a partner with them. I was less than impressed. They don't support all FileMaker features yet. Without even connecting to a server it was agonizingly slow.

The process was indeed that it would take your FileMaker file, convert it to LiveCode, and use the Data API to sync with server. So it is NOT FileMaker Go for Android, sadly.

Well, that is LiveCode and what they sell already as product:

Looks like they have some kind of agreement with Claris, that they won't let you work on the intermediate LiveCode project and build it for other platforms.

I didn't appreciate the lack of info, but at least Claris continues to head in the right direction. 5 years ago the company was a fossil. I was unhappy that my business was connected to the FileMaker ecosystem, but that has since changed.

finally, finally, I have been waiting for Android app for so long.

I am looking for that too.

I am very excited about Android support but I had hoped it would work. I have my doubts the current plan will be usable for work. I am sure I will use it for home use... well that is dependent on cost I guess. It sounds like I would need a fair amount of development time to make all my databases work on the server seeing how it sounds like it will not direct connect like FileMaker go.

In summary I guess it is a mix bag and I should be happy with what I get.

I think there is more information we could get in the Q&A session.

New web-viewer engine for windows this quarter? Please correct me if I am wrong.

Release a new certificate test at the end of this quarter or next quarter

FileMaker Linux Server webinar next month?