FileMaker 13 - worth the upgrade?

[uLearnIT]

In your opinion, what would be some of the new features of FileMaker 13 that would make it worth the upgrade?

I am thinking:

• popovers
• slide objects
• conditional visibility
• custom themes and styles

What else?

[BetaMan]

I'm thinking about an upgrade as well. I had a look at the FileMaker site and saw you can reuse your themes across new solutions, very handy.

And, as someone who loves to use my iPad to add data while I'm off site, the ability for me to use a different keyboard and the Insert from Device script to add images taken from my iPad's camera means I'll have to pull together the money for the update.

[BradTaylor]

In your opinion, what would be some of the new features of FileMaker 13 that would make it worth the upgrade?

I am thinking:

• popovers
• slide objects
• conditional visibility
• custom themes and styles

What else?

Hi uLearnIT,

I guess you're referring to an upgrade from FileMaker 12 to 13, rather than pre-12 to 13?

In my opinion, the layout additions are nice (popovers, etc) but for my purposes not essential. However, from the list of what's new (What's New in FileMaker Pro 13 | FileMaker) a few make it worth it for me, for instance...

Container field metadata: I use FileMaker a lot for cataloguing so am using container fields all the time. In FM 13 I can now get a whole lot more attributes from the file. MD5 hash is particularly nice - previously I used an external programme to generate the hash and then import its results, but now I can get it direct from FM.

Server-side scripts: Being able to trigger a script on the FM server from a client is also a great new feature. Up until now client scripts would have to do all the work. Now they can initiate a server script, and it runs as if it were an FMS scheduled script. The result is then returned to the client. [A practical example: we have clients that upload large amounts of data to an FMS hosted file. Instead of the client running a script on a hosted file to import records from a client file, the client can now export to text, compress, copy the zipped text to the server, and then send a "Perform Script On Server". The server script can then unzip and import from text. This dramatically improves upload performance for clients with low internet bandwidth.]

The above may not be relevant for your needs but other new features may be, so it's difficult to say whether it's worth it for you, but hope this helps.

Cheers,
Brad