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.

by: Jerrald Hayes

MacWorld published a story today FileMaker not compatible with Mac OS X Leopard . That’s certainly not anything I was looking forward to hearing.

However when checking the link in the story about ‘…a support note posted to FileMaker’s Web site’ that was reported to say:

“We are currently working on Leopard compatibility updates for FileMaker Pro 9, FileMaker Pro 9 Advanced, FileMaker Server 9 and FileMaker Server 9 Advanced. At this time FileMaker does not recommend the use of FileMaker 9 products on computers running Mac OS X Leopard,”

….I found that the link to that note was a dead end. That support note was gone and when I searched the FM site for Leopard news I found this Knowledge Base article instead, FileMaker Products and Leopard (Mac OS 10.5) , that then read:

"We continue to test FileMaker 9 products under Leopard. We will have a compatibility announcement when Leopard is released October 26th.

If you would like to be notified when we have additional information, please select the button below.

For notification of FileMaker patches and updates, and other important news, please subscribe to FileMaker News. "

The second statement seems a lot tamer than the first one reported and I guess we’ll only know tomorrow just what the real story is.

I recall a while back that FileMaker 8.5 had Windows Vista issues and an earlier version I don’t recall which had issues for a while with XP and FileMaker Inc. didn’t recommend FM use on Windows machines when they first came out my own testing at the time found the issues weren’t fatal. They we’re just ugly and/or really inconvenient. Still I wouldn’t trust any mission critical applications to run on Leopard until we get the good word from Apple and FileMaker.

Given that FileMaker, Inc. is owned by Apple, Inc. you have to wonder just how did this kind of glitch end up happening?

by: Jerrald Hayes