Apple September 9 Announcements and FileMaker

Yesterday, Apple announced several new products including the iPhone 6, Apple Watch, and Apple Pay for mobile payments. The new technologies available will fuel the next few years on innovation as will iOS 8 which will be released soon.

In the mobile space these announcements primarily affect FileMaker Go, the FileMaker client that runs directly on the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad.  The iPhone 6 larger screen size may spawn the need for a couple of more custom screen grid templates in FileMaker though a well designed iPhone interface layout should automatically scale for use on the larger displays. The larger screen size will also make possible to create more detailed interfaces similar to the iPad but in a factor that more people will be carrying with them.

The faster processor of the iPhone 6 should make FileMaker Go even more responsive and the faster LTE and WiFi will positively affect the capabilities of FileMaker Go to connect to live databases hosted on servers which are currently limited by the network connection speed and latency.

Will FileMaker Go run on the Apple Watch? We’ll have to wait and see. At this point it seems less likely it might but apps on the iWatch may be able to communicate with FileMaker Go on your iPhone through some mechanism such as the FMP URL.  Building a custom web site that communicates with FileMaker and runs in a mini Safari window on the Apple Watch may also be an option.

Hopefully, FileMaker will provide access via FileMaker Go to the new APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) available in iOS 8 that allow applications to read the new sensors that affect health monitoring in the Apple Watch. This would be similar to how they have provided access to other features on the iPhone such as the camera, geolocation, bar code scanning, etc. It seems likely. If so, then we could move this data into a FileMaker database for analysis and reporting.

iOS 8 influences the design of FileMaker solutions and apps as iOS 7 has already done. We’ve been redesigning our FileMaker apps to have a flat design style. Flat design is a philosophy that argues for simple, clear, and honest use of materials in user interface. It often uses less shading and shadows simpler icons, heightened colors, etc. It is in opposition to skeumorphic design where the user interface attempts to mimic something in real life like a leather day planner for example.

All in all, the future of Apple looks very bright. The numbers are staggering for the market penetration of their products and possibilities that exist for them to continue making incredible profits. With FileMaker being a wholly-owned subsidiary of Apple, we can expect that there will continue to be major R&D investments in FileMaker that will keep it at the forefront of its category. The FileMaker platform will continue to be the premiere tool for quickly creating custom workgroup application solutions across multiple platforms including iOS, Mac OS, Windows, and the web.