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While it might not be seen by a lot of users, the re-designed Inspector is one of the more useful new features for developers in FileMaker Pro 11. While it’s been around in one form or another for a while, up until now it’s been pretty basic, allowing you to adjust the size and position of an object, as well as (in more recent versions) the object name.
The new Inspector keeps all of that, but also takes a lot of the functionality that used to be hidden in menus and puts it all in one place laid out in three tabs (Position, Appearance and Data). From here you can set an object’s appearance (colour, borders, text size, font and style, text alignment), sliding and printing options, group objects together, set tool tips, etc. If you’re working with a field, you can select it, set the control style (drop down list, check box, etc.) or set the format for date, time and number fields.
Another nice feature is that you can open multiple copies of the Inspector; if you’ve got a big enough monitor, you can keep three (or more) versions of the Inspector up, so you don’t have to constantly flip between the tabs.
If you’re used to developing in previous FileMaker versions, it might take a bit of time to get used to the new Inspector, but once you do, you probably won’t want to go back.
4 Comments
The “Inspector” is the worst feature of Filemaker 11. It would be all right if Filemaker had not removed the contextual menus that do the same thing, the ability to use keyboard shortcuts and had not eliminated the small “Object Info” pallet . The “Inspectors” take up to much screen real estate and interfere with production especially when using a laptop. Using the Inspector increases the development time by at least 10% on new layouts even when using a large monitor. I have had to go back to Filemaker 10 for new development because of the “Inspector”.
Filemaker is probably to busy developing Bento to pay attention to what is happening with their flagship product. What would Filemaker Pro be like if they used the resources used to develop Bento to improve Filemaker Pro Advanced and make it a first class development tool?
I guess this falls under the category of ‘your mileage may vary’ – everybody has a way of doing things that works best for them. I do agree that they shouldn’t have removed the context menus or keyboard shortcuts, since as you pointed out there are people who prefer using them. Personally, I find it convenient that I can make multiple changes to an object (change the borders, set the background colour, set the date format, set the field alignment, etc) all in one place rather than having to open and close a number of windows in order to do everything.
I can only agree with Robert; the Inspector is too large and the previous dialogs for editing objects were easy to access in version 10. I also use FMP10Adv. for work in Layout mode. Let’s see at DevCon what news FMI has for us…