mtriviso

AppleSince1976 said:

I haven't developed in Filemaker or Omnis for a couple of decades (damn! I'm old!); but greatly enjoyed working in both. Does Filemaker still have the hands-down easiest onscreen-layout and Report generation tools?

You mention Omnis, and how it has unfortunately tried to stay afloat by huge price increases. Shame. Back in the day (late 80's early 90s), it did things with integrating online data that nobody else was doing! Always was a little ugly, though... ;-)

And I didn't hear you mention another great cross-platform local/online database Dev. system: 4D (4th Dimension). They had some really promising stuff, too. But I haven't heard anything about/from them for several years now.

Oh, snap! I stand corrected! Looks like they are still quite Apple-supportive, too! Plus now you can build iOS Apps (and as always with 4D, Web Apps). Nice!

https://us.4d.com/

FileMaker is stupid easy to use. It's really quite amazing how well it works. We have a large, 75GB database being run from FileMaker Server and it just chugs along never complaining and never crashing. It's very reliable. Designing reports in FileMaker is so easy to do. I still remember going crazy with Crystal Reports back in the olden days.

When I toiled in the corporate world, using Omnis was easy because I never had to worry about paying for it. But once I hit the independent scene, it just became impossible to afford. The last time I used Omnis was in the late 90s working on a front end to a Oracle database for the National Science Foundation. It's a luxury environment that is only found in large corporations anymore. When Blyth was running the show, Omnis 3+ was still affordable for small outfits. God, I feel so old.

I have never used 4D, but it is good to see there are other tools out there.