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Welcome FileMaker 16

FileMaker Inc. just released FileMaker 16, it’s latest version of the FileMaker product family for database based business solutions.

Our MBS Plugin has been in testing with various beta versions the last months and a couple of issues have been resolved. You can download latest 7.2 beta from our plugin and use it today. We currently look with the final release of FileMaker 16 for issues, so we can release our 7.2 release next week.

With FileMaker 16 the WebViewer moves from older WebKit 1.x to the newer 2.x version. The newer WebKit APIs use a separate process to render webpages which makes it more secure. And they provide newer JavaScript version, higher performance and a lot of new WebKit features. FileMaker 16 uses WKWebView control to implement it and our plugin detects that on runtime. With 7.1 and 7.2 we rewrote all WebView functions, so they can either use the old or newer API depending on which WebKit version is used. Some features are no longer possible due to the rendering going on in another process.

Second big change is the script workspace which got a couple of internal changes for our plugin. The syntax coloring has been updated for 7.2 to work in FileMaker 16.

Third we got iOS support for our plugin for FileMaker’s iOS SDK. The new version can be used with plugin and MBS Plugin for iOS is included in the 7.2 download. Of course a lot of functions will not be available for iOS, e.g. there is no serial port on an iPhone. But over 2000 functions in our plugin should work well on iOS including things like Barcode creation or encryption functions.

As with the Linux version, the iOS version will grow over time. Please try it and let me know if you run into any issues. We add new features for iOS later this year. Already you can try notifications on iOS with a lot of options. This should work with local and remote notifications.

Everyone should try FileMaker 16, but before deploying it, find time to test all features of your solution and make the required changes. Than later this summer when you updated your scripts, layouts and plugins, you can start deploying it.
09 05 17 - 15:42