
I’ve looked at MANY alternatives and haven’t found anything that measures up in terms of pure power and speed of development. In the 30 plus years I’ve been working with Filemaker, I can assure you I’ve never stopped looking for something better. Obviously those two ideas are not possible in the same product. The cost of Filemaker licenses and server has long been a subject of debate among people who want their software to be cheap and well-supported. In the latter case, you can bring your own license but if you don’t have one, they’ll happily add the cost to your monthly number. While you can host your files on your own server, you’ll need licensing to accomplish it… that cost is built in to the subscription cost whether you use Claris’ cloud offering or FMP Host. The cloud servers from Claris is a service that is actually comparable to buying server space from some of the various FM hosting companies. I wonder if the Webdirect feature is seen as a way of deploying Filemaker apps to someone who doesn’t want to install a Filemaker client? I never used it myself, but I saw the appeal. I feel for people who had built a business on that model, but frankly you’ve had plenty of time to work out what’s next since we’ve known it was a deprecated feature.

In reference to the run-times we used to be able to create, we have known for 10 years that those were on the way out and it took them this long to finally pull that trigger. Those are now turned on with a checkbox in the preferences. Not everyone needs the functionality that Advanced provides, specifically the script debugger and other such developer tools. I can’t believe nobody has corrected you yet… Advanced hasn’t gone away at all, it just that they’re no longer making it a separate product.

