On 13 Dec 2010, at 11:07, David Thorp wrote:

> And I think that was the primary point of much of my previous email! :p  
> 
> The reality is it's both.  And that's one of the amazing things about it.  
> 
> I think that fact frustrates the heck out of many of us developers, because sometimes we forget about all those users who just use it as an application (glorified bento, data-oriented and friendlier excel), but I wonder how many of us would be in business if it wasn't for that fact.  I believe FM's popularity is partly due to its ability to so well cater to both markets.  Alas, in some ways that same fact causes it to cater to neither quite as well as we'd like.
> 
> Wouldn't it be nice if the division between the two was greater: ie. if FMPA was *more* of an application development environment than it is (eg. XCode), and if FMP was *more* of an application than it is (eg. better and multi-user Bento), or something like that...

Well put!

If the original developers are still around, I wonder what they think of what their little desktop application has become?

We can't ignore the history of Filemaker and the user base that has developed. So we don't have a pure application development environment, and we get a lot of features that might be considered end-user-ish. Overall, I think that makes Filemaker a better application (even if I find the toolbar ugly!).

Isn't FM Go interesting? It *is* the app(lication) version of Filemaker Pro isn't it? A desktop version of Go, priced somewhere between the iPad version and regular FMP, would give us a really replete lineup...

Steve