Very cool! I wondered where the “ccs” in your handle came from. Caracas… of course!
No, I was never a member of CompuServe. I joined a large Macintosh users group in our area. Eventually became the sysop of their dial-up bulletin board that ran on a PC with DOS 6.2. Served as the club president for two years. The Mac was young, people were excited about it. We had a great time. I actually earned a few bucks writing some HyperCard stacks, slow as they were.
It sounds like your experience with those Claris products comes from a more technically astute perspective than mine as I was never a “real” programmer… interpreted languages at best, and even they are a challenge
I used FileMaker professionally for over ten years. It is/was a remarkable product specially after it went relational. That’s how I leared RDBMS. I used FMP not just to create systems but also as a prototyping tool for systems that were actually done in some more formal language like C or Pascal.
I was involved in one such project that had a really weird ending. I joined up with a crack C and Pascal programmer. I was to do the design and he would do the coding. I prototyped the system with FMP, he never did finish coding it. It was one of those projects where everything that could go wrong did. It ended badly, we never finished the job, I lost a friend and made an enemy. The surprise ending is that they ran the business on my prototype FMP mockup!
Did you ever use FMP on a PC or was your experience exclusively Mac?
Enjoyed the story about the project with the weird ending. Not really surprised to hear about the success of the mockup. FMP is/was a powerful product and your thorough design took advantage of its strengths!!!
My experience with FMP occurred before it went relational. I loved it. Have actually toyed with the idea of buying a version compiled for the PC, but am unsure if I could adapt to it (or if it would be worth today’s price ). Besides that, I’m tired of having to adapt to new versions of Windows. (Windows 7 NOT and Windows 8 looming already.) Seriously considering starting all over with a new Mac or a Linux box. I’m just a hobbiest these days.
Mac only, I have a terrible aversion to Windows. Not to Microsoft. I was a certified developer for both Apple (Mac) and Microsoft (Excel). Microsoft treated their certified developers much better than Apple ever did. It’s the eternal conundrum, great company with lousy product vs. lousy company with great product.
Seriously considering starting all over with a new Mac or a Linux box. I’m just a hobbiest these days.
On the new Macs you can run both OSX and Windows so it’s a safe bet. What I would not do is to get tied up with proprietary software like FMP, no matter how good it is. The open-source web-app is the future. LAMP, AJAX, HTML5. I’ve been replacing my database and spreadsheet based apps with web-apps. One great discovery was PHPExcel which has all the Excel functions because there was no way I could rewrite that stuff! http://phpexcel.codeplex.com/
Denny, coding for half a century certainly is an impressive feat and that certainly would require a lot of questions to be asked and answered. I’d certainly agree about trying to be organised with code to reduce maintenance and debugging time, etc.
Thanks xhtmlcoder! The good thing about asking questions is that it proves you are still alive. When you have all the answers you might as well be dead since you have nothing left to learn. :devil:
). Besides that, I’m tired of having to adapt to new versions of Windows. (Windows 7 NOT and Windows 8 looming already.) Seriously considering starting all over with a new Mac or a Linux box. I’m just a hobbiest these days. 
Windows. Not to Microsoft. I was a certified developer for both Apple (Mac) and Microsoft (Excel). Microsoft treated their certified developers much better than Apple ever did. It’s the eternal conundrum, great company with lousy product vs. lousy company with great product.
