First era
Many years ago, a television producer I was working with gleefully showed me a small program he used to list all of his professional contacts along with camera rental companies, rates and so on. He was rather proud to add that he had built it himself with an intuitive and brilliant database program. I told him how impressed I was, but added that I would never have the patience to do the same and that my Filofax, very fashionable in those years, did the job just fine with a simple pen and fit in my pocket, unlike his.
That was my first encounter with FileMaker, and I quickly forgot it.
A few years later...
On another continent, between two film technician contracts, I found myself in an office where my colleagues and I had to spend whole days getting quotes from air and road carriers in order to ship works of art. We were constantly juggling price catalogues, phone calls and faxes, and hunting for the right Excel file, updated or not.
One morning I opened the drawer of the printer cabinet and came across a software box still in its packaging, with installation floppy disks and a full learning manual. That was my second chance encounter with FileMaker, and it would be the decisive one.
In the evening, on my old Macintosh and while working my way through the manual, I built a quoting tool that compared supplier prices against destinations and the volumetric weight of the crates, then a little later a system to manage inventory across three art storage warehouses, plus timesheets and installation crews. My employer could not believe it: a custom system for a small business at so small a cost was something he had never imagined. That was in 1998, and the application, updated many times over, is still running.
That was the first FileMaker "era", when the entrepreneur, the craftsperson or the shopkeeper was encouraged to build their own management tools. But computing has evolved so much in what it can do and in how complex it is that this model no longer seems suited to me. Like Excel or Photoshop, FileMaker has become over the years a very powerful and versatile tool, and only professionals can really make the most of what it can do.
To be continued.
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