The Ideal FileMaker Development Environment

Recently we were challenged with the following question: What is so special about the way you develop FileMaker apps? Can’t I just do that myself on my own computer with FileMaker Pro?

 

Well…in some senses the answer is “Yes”…but with some caveats. One advantage of working with our full-time FileMaker solution engineers is their experience with multiple systems and companies where we can implement best practices learned from working full-time developing all the time. Another huge advantage is the ability we have to reuse work that we have already done so we don’t have to write everything from scratch every time. For example, we might write code to integrate FileMaker with MailChimp (a common mass e-mail marketing tool). The first time this is done it might take 40-80 hours. But the second time we implement this we can significantly reduce the amount of time it takes to maybe 5-10 hours…saving time with the ability to deliver it more quickly as well as for a more economical price.

In addition, our FileMaker developers utilize a high-end hardware and software environment to make development of solutions fast and effective. The faster we work, the more value you get for your hourly investment. We do our development on MacBooks for portability and the ability to run both MacOS and multiple versions of Windows on our machines for testing across platforms. We use large screen displays that make it easy to have multiple windows open for comparison and data transfer or development.

Hardware: MacBook Pro with 16 GB RAM and 1 TB SSD drives. 27 inch Thunderbolt widescreen display featuring a cinematic 16:9 aspect ratio and 2560-by-1440 resolution. $4,000

Here are some of the software tools we use on a regular basis:

• FileMaker Advanced $450  Includes script debugger, data viewer, database design reports and other features.
• 2empowerFM Developer Assistant $395   Add powerful search capabilities to FileMaker
• BaseElements $499 FileMaker solution analysis
• Inspector $495 FileMaker solution analysis
• Adobe Creative Suite – Illustrator and Photoshop  $1,299 Image asset creation and illustration
• Parallels and various versions of Windows 7-10/Anti-virus software, etc. $500 Cross platform testing
• Microsoft Office – Word, Excel, PowerPoint AND Apple Pages, Numbers, and Keynote $399
• OmniGraffle Pro $199 Diagramming
• Balsamiq Mockups $89 Design and wireframe solutions

We utilize many other tools for client and team communications, project management, remote managment, etc. but we’ll leave that for another article.

Our standard development workstation represents a significant investment of over $8,000 for each developer. This is yet another advantage of working with our team to provide you the best FileMaker solutions available quickly and cost-effectively.

If you want to do “do-it-yourself” development on your own computer you can…but you should plan to make an investment in your tools, time, and training to get up to speed to do development at a level that people expect with modern software.