What is FileMaker Pro 5.5?

FileMaker has been the leading database program on the Mac platform for more than a decade, and version 5.5 continues the winning streak, adding support for Mac OS X along with a number of minor but useful improvements. If you only handle a small number of records, you'll love FileMaker’s Mac OS X support — the program behaves much as it does under Mac OS 9. However, attempt to handle a large number of records under Mac OS X and FileMaker moves with glacial slowness. Despite this, FileMaker Pro 5.5 is the best major port to Mac OS X we've seen yet.

If you’re not familiar with FileMaker Pro, it’s a work-efficiency app that lets you easily create your own databases and customize their look and behavior using a wealth of tools. You can create relationships between databases and publish them to a Web page.

The port of FileMaker’s basic interface to Mac OS X is an unqualified success — the interface is so familiar that it’s easy to forget you’re in OS X — until you switch applications during a lengthy computation. Gone is FileMaker’s annoying tendency to stall your Mac during long sorts, searches, and computations. In Mac OS X, you can easily switch to other applications and let FileMaker work in the background.

Unfortunately, if you use large data sets, FileMaker runs more slowly in Mac OS X than in older systems. In tests we conducted with a data set of 20,000 records. Importing took twice as long under OS X as under OS 9, and sorting took three times as long. FileMaker’s Import function suffers from OS X’s complex file-typing scheme — you can’t Import some text files (TextEdit plain-text ones, for example) until you change the file type to TEXT. The exporting features also suffer: If you plan to use any Mac OS X Unix-based tools, be prepared to do some extra mucking around — FileMaker exports traditional Mac-style text files (with a hard return terminating each line), which tend to confound Unix tools.

While support for Mac OS X is definitely FileMaker Pro 5.5’s most notable new feature, it’s hardly the only one. The Web publishing feature has sped up considerably (the server is now multithreaded), and you can turn off that wretched set of controls FileMaker Pro 5 used to display on every database you published. You can also run limited scripts from the Web and set access privileges on a record-by-record basis.

However, we wish the Import tool were more powerful — its limitations made it needlessly difficult to import fixed-field data, text files not of type TEXT, and white space-delimited data. We’d also welcome better integration with OS X’s suite of Unix tools (and it would increase the program’s power tremendously). Still, FileMaker offers the best combination of simplicity and power in its field, making it the database leader for the Macintosh.

Sammis, Ian. (September 2001). FileMaker Pro 5.5. MacAddict. (pg. 50).

Download FileMaker Pro 5.5 for Mac

Architecture

IBM PowerPC

System Requirements

From Mac OS 8.1 up to Mac OS 10.4

Compatibility notes

Need more than 16 MB RAM to run.

Emulating this? It could probably run under: Basilisk II