Despite my fears (FileMaker’s Not Leopard Compatible? What the Heck?) the upgrade to the Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard had no impact at all on my use of FileMaker Pro. And here it is just a little over a week later and FileMaker, Inc. announced today:

FileMaker Pro 9.0v2 update delivers Leopard compatibility and more

FileMaker has released FileMaker Pro 9.0v2 and FileMaker Pro 9.0v2 Advanced, available now via a downloadable update. The 9.0v2 update provides compatibility with Mac OS X Leopard as described below, and other features, and is recommended for all users.

Here is a list of other fixes in the 9.0v2 update that developers will be most interested in:

Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard):
The application no longer crashes when creating files if the system language and region do not match.

General Fixes:
Mac OS X: Get(SystemVersion) now returns the correct version on Mac OS X operating systems ending with double digit revision numbers, i.e. 10.4.10.

The database consistency check initiated on launch will no longer incorrectly report that a database is damaged for some databases that can be opened and used without any problems.

Printing Fixes:
The update addresses issues which cause the application to crash when a page range is specified.

Relationships:
A relationship with a global field now returns all related records if the value of the other key is empty.

For a complete list of fixes please refer to the updater Read Me or FileMaker downloads at http://www.filemaker.com/support/downloads/index.html

Click here for the details and to download the FileMaker Pro 9.0v2 and FileMaker Pro 9.0v2 Advanced
Leopard update now.

Please note that this update does not fix issues with the FileMaker Pro 9 Instant Web Publishing (IWP) feature
running on Leopard. We intend to make IWP compatible with Leopard in an update expected in December 2007.

We expect to deliver a Leopard compatibility update for our Server products in early 2008. FileMaker Server 9 and FileMaker Server 9 Advanced currently do not deploy properly on Leopard. In
the meantime, FileMaker Pro 9 and
FileMaker Pro 9 Advanced clients running on Leopard do work with FileMaker
Server and Server Advanced running
on Tiger or earlier versions of Mac OS X.

For timely news on the availability of compatibility updates for IWP, and for FileMaker Server 9 and FileMaker
Server 9 Advanced, please subscribe to FileMaker News .

Click here for info on earlier versions of FileMaker software and Mac OS X Leopard.

-The FileMaker Team

Well that’s all good news for the most part but does it let the folks at FileMaker, Inc. (and Apple Computer which owns FileMaker) off the hook? Well maybe not. I think the clumsy way they all handled the news surrounding this upgrade has blown the sheet off of some of the no so nice aspects of how FileMaker deals with developers and users. read Matt Petrowsky’s blog post of Friday, October 26, 2007 – 2:25pm FileMaker Falls Behind for an excellent rant on FM Inc.

How’s all that make me feel? Am I turned off on FileMaker (and Apple) now? The whole story just illustrates that there is still a whole lot of room at the top for a lot of improvement and I’m actually looking forward to seeing those improvements in policy and mananagement one soon in the near future too.

Jerrald Hayes is both a Business Management & IT Consultant and a Building & Remodeling Contractor based out of Katonah NY.
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