Goya Pty Ltd

Congratulations to Darrin Southern who finally found the time to sit the FileMaker 9 Certification test this week and, of course, passed with flying colours.

Certification is just one of the reasons why you'd be smart to get Goya to work on your next FileMaker project.

Goya is pleased to announce it's sponsorship of FMSummit 2008, the FileMaker developer conference held in Antwerp in April.

Goya is sponsoring FMSummit to promote it's BaseElements developer tool. We are not attending the conference this year as our Dutch lessons haven't yet finished, but we look forward to future conferences in Antwerp and may attend next year.

Well FileMaker DevCon 2007 is over. We had a very successful show and had mountains of positive feedback for BaseElements. We're looking forward to beginning the process of demonstrating our UpdateManager tool next.

Also just before DevCon, we released BaseElements 1.6, which features a comparison reporting tool, allowing you to compare an old version of your solution to a new version. So it's possible to document changes to your solution over time. This report takes advantage of some of the new Conditional Formatting options available in FileMaker 9, and gives us some neat effects in highlighting parts of the report.

We're looking to have our UpdateManager demo out in the next month or so.

Today FileMaker Inc released version 9.0 of FileMaker Pro and Server. This is a huge release, probably the biggest since v7 came out a few years back.

Although the new debugger and scripting functions will be probably the biggest time saver for developers, by far the biggest feature is ESS. ESS stands for External SQL Sources. What this means is you can have a table of data in FMP that comes from an SQL ODBC data source, and treat it just like it was normal FileMaker data. So, your FMP database can add, delete, read and write to your back end SQL data source on top of it's existing FMP data.

This will change the way FileMaker is perceived in some areas, and without a doubt will add to it's user base. We're looking forward to all of the possibilities this opens up with FileMaker, and showing this to our clients.

And we've updated BaseElements for all of the new FMP 9 features, so all of the FileMaker developers can starting using 9 straight away without compromising their ability to analyse and document their solutions. We've got a couple more updates of BaseElements scheduled before devcon in just 3 weeks time, so we're going to be flat out like a lizard drinking over the next few weeks.

Today we've released today version 1.3.0 of our flagship FileMaker Pro developer tool, BaseElements, and I thought it might be handy to recap for those interested some of the bigger changes we've introduced since 1.0 was released in January :

• Runtime versions.
• The ability to add your own scripts and layouts.
• A plugin function tracking system.
• The ability to track variables, both global and local.
• A comprehensive Indirection system, to work with the existing Unreferenced system.
• A detailed "Warning" system for potential FileMaker issues.
• Much more detail and information about Layout Objects, including object names and tabs.
• New list layouts for Field References, CustomFunction references and ValueList references.
• New table for Sort Order Items.
• A print script function.
• An option to highlight "Web Compatible" scripts.
• And much more...

There is of course many more other features, a lot of changes and improvements, and a bunch of bug fixes. All of the changes are detailed in the full Version History page.

So if you've tried BaseElements 1.0 at any point and not kept up to date with the new releases, we think this is a good time to give it another run. There are lots of new additions to BaseElements that will help you in your FileMaker Pro development.

But don't think that's all, with DevCon coming up we've got lots of plans for more features before August, so stay tuned.

The 2007 FileMaker Developer Conference is being held this year in Orlando Florida from 5th August.

Although this isn't the first year someone from Goya has been to the conference, it's the first year we've had a product to sell. So we're proud to announce that we'll be demonstrating BaseElements at a product stand at this years Devcon.

If you've considered going to DevCon before but haven't, we think this will be a great year to attend. The direction that the conference is taking with the expanded session range means it's even more valuable to an even wider range of developers.

And if you'd like to see BaseElements in action and to meet the developer, then we'd love to see you there too. Come and visit and say hello at our stand in the product showcase section.

We're proud to annouce that we've released a version 1.0 of BaseElements. It's taken a little while longer than we expected, but it's here at last. Get your download and your demo code too.

The feedback we've got so far during the beta has been very encouraging, and we'd like to thank everyone who downloaded, tested, contributed, and most of all, sent us notes to tell us what they thought.

We've also had lots of feedback about potential new features people would like to see, so we've got lots more plans for updates and changes down the track. So stay tuned.

BaseElements is now publicly available and ready for download. Grab yourself a copy, make sure you have a demo code and send us any feedback.

I have always thought a "Launch" involves champagne and balloons and streamers. Ours seemed to just involve some typing in a copy of terminal and a late night.

But here we are. Goya has been around for over 10 years, and we finally have a website.

Take a look around, check out the products and about pages, and contact us if you have any queries.

We'll be adding more over the next few weeks especially as we gear up to release the first of our developer products. We're especially excited about the new BaseElements which we think will be a FMP development essential. Stay tuned for more information.

Cheers,
Nick