It’s been unusually quiet in the soup. I have been very caught up away from the computer and hope everyone else is just busy with an increase of business. I hope there won’t be lasting effects to the technical issues we experienced after the site was renamed.
For my part, I’ve been trying to finish some renovations to rent the upstairs unit of the house I rent to reduce the hemorrhage while I seek to stabilize my incomes.
I wonder how Claris announcements have impacted developers, how everyone is coping with the uncertainty of a future which parameters we don’t grasp fully yet.
I believe Claris is close to ending their fiscal year, so wanting to finish strong, their focus is usually on selling licences / renewals.
Also, the announcements made at Devcon are not yet available, I expect they will get busy to push out their cloud / hosting offering, with all the questions this brings to the table (FileMaker ID, 24/7 support for the cloud components, …). From there, I’m sure there will be plenty of questions about transitions, price comparisons, limitations, …
Claris connect will follow that (can’t recall when they projected the release), with its own set of implications.
The current product has been released for a good while, people who had questions about that have been able to get answers.
Yup, also flat out here, although moving the office to a village in Rhodes for a fortnight for a change and some warmer weather, but will still be developing and supporting customers. No time for a ‘holiday’.
My main complaint about all software vendors. Each one thinks we exclusively use their software, we need to attend webinars, we should become officially certified despite 30 plus years of using their software and have to view the fear in the eyes of their representatives if anything approaching technical is mentioned.
Based on our hourly rate, the amount of time we’ve invested in their marketing activities has cost thousands each year, Particularly as we have to listen to the same messages repetitively.
By the sounds of it, most here need to focus on their own company and ambitions and wish for support rather than constant demands from the collection of suppliers we use. Mostly we feel the opposite.
We’ve 2 new orders this week, one involving 30 licenses, the other development work from a long-term customer. We have a workload that is stretching our resources and we could sell many more licenses given more freedom than we have and also a government that could actually govern. But that is not the situation, so our revenue, and the revenue of our chosen suppliers is being restricted because they know better than us, as apparently do our shambolic collection of politicians.
Wow, I feel better after that and am thankful for our fantastic clients (and friends) that we have worked with for the last 15 years. I also believe they are equally grateful for the number of times we’ve had to ‘rescue’ a situation created by another software update that has broken well designed and implemented design (thanks Microsoft for update 1803 last year, we would have loved to have made our son’s graduation presentation).
Well put, @AndyHibbs. I am on vacation, too. Blinking into the sun and enjoying the beauty of Liguria.
A ‘service’ update broke the NAS backup routine last week and corrupted existing backups. During the past four days I disk-jockeyed on the beach: mount/unmount local drives, launching backup routines, telling staff when to change disks. A new service backup fixed it. On the bright side, I am pleased that our safety routines worked well and that almost all the admin work can be done on an iPhone.
We all made the disturbing discovery that what is called a narcissistic personality disorder extends to organisations as well.
NAS…
as filemaker 18 came out earlier this year, I decided to ‘go macOS 10.14’, my systems were all on 10.12
It became a disaster for me
Under 10.14, the systems were all but stable. It turned out, that the NASos was too old - but it was a nightmare
first, I had to realize that
then, only about the first 2 updates could be installed via the NASos
one update had to be installed manually
the 2. last update offered a button called ‘auto update’
that solved the issue, the NASos installed another patch and afterwards, the 10.14 were good (is still fine as of today)
Unfortunately, I had to re-activate my old Mac (I bought a new 6-core Mini, my old Mac should be ‘transformed’ to a fms-only machine. That old Mac was not yet reseted, therefore Mail was still active - I ‘lost’ some emails because I forgot to stutdown that Mac after the issue was resolved… was too much stressy…
Busy here too. FileMaker isn’t my main income earner, I would like it to be but for now it’s playing second fiddle to my other consultancy work. I work with small, medium size,£6m-£30m, businesses that use a particular ERP/MRP called Kerridge. Where I can I sell my FileMaker solutions that add value to this core package.
I’m extremely busy right now working on stock demand forecast modelling and trying to achieve a 20% reduction in stock holding for this business - that would release £250k back into the cash flow.
New functions with FM18 deal with processes I had to solve already with PlugIns in the past. No new functions that would encourage me to do the update.
I just updated a FMServer customer with weak DSL WAN with a new Data Model that I call “Pull-nd-Chop”.
“Pull” means you pull the data with a most accurate SQL query in order to reduce WAN traffic as much as possible.
“Chop” is a process where the SQL data gets separated into field values which get set as MBS.Variables with formula based names to get resolved in a kind of a virtual list technique.
You can call this either ingenious OR chaotic, nothing in between
Fact is, a crucial script is now down from 7 to less than 2 seconds!
