Originally published at: https://tidbits.com/2019/08/07/filemaker-retakes-the-claris-name-after-21-years/
FileMaker Inc. has announced that it will once again be known as Claris, indicating a larger vision for the Apple subsidiary.
ClarisDraw - good app.
We lost a lot when Claris dropped AppleWorks instead of pushing the tools into the future
Often wonder why Steve Jobs killed it OR didnāt bring that suite of applications into the main company. Probably a personal issue
And Bento wasnāt very successful
Iām not sure what the advantage of bringing back a brand that hasnāt been around for more than two decades.
I used Filemaker back when an ordinary person could afford it. Loved it because it made my church work so much easier. Then they went big business and we of the poor clergy group couldnāt quite afford it - too many baskets of apples! lol. I now use Tap Forms 5 for most things but do miss the beauty of Filemaker. Wish them well - no, not really, after all the transferring I had to do to get years of pastoral records and membership materials out of the blasted thing ;-(
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August 7We lost a lot when Claris dropped AppleWorks instead of pushing the tools into the future
Often wonder why Steve Jobs killed it OR didnāt bring that suite of applications into the main company. Probably a personal issue
If I remember correctly, Claris was spun off shortly after Steve Jobs returned to Apple. At the time, Claris Works lagged very, very, very far behind MS Office, and Apple needed every penny it could muster to bring the Mac line up to speed, and also to convince companies to investminto developing software for Macs. They were loosing Mac developers at a terrifying rate and the chances that Windows would inflict a fatal blow was very real. Most probably, Steve had to invest every penny and all the human power he could into Mac OS and hardware development, and the resulting OS X and iMac line secured his place in history.
But at that time there was no way Apple could compete with MS Office, Dynamics, etc. which had cornered about 90% of the business/personal productivity market on PCs and Macs. But MS refused to develop Acess for its Mac Office suite (and it still wonāt). FileMaker worked and was selling just fine as a standalone, but copies of Apple or ClarisWorks were no longer moving. Steve didnāt have much of a choice on this one.
And Bento wasnāt very successful
To say the least. Personally, Iāve been using FileMaker since the mid 90s, when the Mac centric creative company I went to work for had switched to Word and Excel, which I was using at another job and at home. And like me, they couldnāt get used to Access so they stuck with FileMaker. At other jobs I suffered the tortures of the dammed with Access, FoxPro, Telemagic, and another one whose name I canāt remember. I love FileMaker, but I still miss the late lamented HyperCard.
In 2003 I documented my frustrations with MS Access here:
http://users.tpg.com.au/users/aoaug/ms_dig.html#wish
I still do some database work with my 40 year old DOS āappā Open Access (nothing to do with Microsoft). Its high-level programming language incorporating SQL relationships is very useful.
The first thing I do when looking to upgrade a macOS version or migrate to a new Mac is to check that I can run Open Access in a window in DOSBOX for Mac.
Despite becoming prohibitively expensive for non-business users Filemaker still lacks the fundamental database tools of Open Access (or they are very complicated to achieve - certainly not intuitive).
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Filemaker is extraordinary in the current offering, a development tool which people do make real money with. I used it often in the early days when all seemed possible and looking at it now, itās quite remarkable how sophisticated it is.
I took up with it again a few years back when I was looking to advise companies on digital publishing, I needed a tool I could develop comparative reports on options they faced, I was very impressed again with how much you could do, my tinker-with-this head was very tempted to jump back in full time.
Amen, sister. The authoring system which should have been sustained.
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I go as far back as FileMaker II which was around 1989(?)
Hereās hoping FileMaā¦ er, Claris, donāt go down the Adobe path and have āsubscription-onlyā in the future ins5tead of single-user versions.
Itās bad enough paying a yearly upgrade to get the latest version. Wait! Thatās almost aā¦subscription!
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They do have purchase prices that are not subscription, but you have to dig around their site to find it.
At least this Claris product is still working as intended without a single upgrade in over 20 years!
Thatās not saying much; Bento actually sucked big time. I think Apple forced FileMaker to make a non-professional and economical database app but FileMaker didnāt want something that might impair sales of their cash cow FileMaker Pro. So they created Bento and made it as bad and useless as they could get away with so it would be cancelled for poor sales - and they succeeded!
I miss the clean functionality of Claris CAD. It was a great tool to complete a 2D floor-plan in the field.
Five years ago, I found my spare, sealed copy of Claris CAD buried in the back of the closet. Put it on E-bay with a starting bid of .99. Was shocked when it was bid up to $180. The winning bidder was a architecture firm in San Fransisco that valued its simple interface and tools for quick project workups. They were excited to get it and had kept the hardware to run it.
I still have my Nashoba Systems hardcover manual. I spent years many years teaching and using FileMaker. I really wish I had a tool like this for the 2-3 times a year I could use it for some volunteer or community effort. I stopped buying at FileMaker v 11, just couldnāt justify the high cost for my intermittent use.
Yes, same here Randy. Too occasional to keep upgrading. My last version is 13.
Iām at v11 too. Eventually Iāll need to buy at least v16 to run on Catalina, but I canāt find any affordable licenses. There was one rather inexpensive single-user license for v16 on Amazon, but according to several reviews the seller is a scammer. Iām not paying $540 just to run a simple little old database. But I donāt want to have to virtualize either. Oh well.