A few people have asked me about which versions of their OS will BE3 run under. There is a little detail, so I’ll include it all here with some explanations and put the specifics into the FAQ section.
Firstly, BE3 is designed for FMP 11 and will close if you attempt to open it under earlier copies of FileMaker Pro. We tend to update BaseElements for the latest features in the OS each time so that we can build on the new capabilities. We realise that not everyone will have the latest version straight away, but runtimes are available that mean you don’t need to have the latest FMP to have the latest BE version.
So the general requirements for BaseElements are the same as the requirements for FMP 11.
I have tested BaseElements 3 on the iPad via FileMaker Go and it does load and work. There are some font issues that need to be worked around, and also some issues with the fact that plugins are not available. I’d like to think we could get a version of BaseElements that works, minus importing and translated dialogs for the iPad very soon. We may have a few issues with displaying of data and missing toolbars and menus, but they can also be resolved relatively simply.
I don’t think it’s feasible to run BE on an iPhone, although it would work the layouts are not designed for that, and it would be a lot of work to design more iPhone friendly layouts. I’m not going to do anything to prevent this, I just won’t be working towards an iPhone version I don’t think.
BaseElements Plugin Requirements
Plus we have a new plugin in BaseElements that has it’s own separate requirements. The basic requirements are the same as for FMP 11 with some additional caveats :
The plugin is currently intel only. It’s a non-trivial amount of work to get a PPC version up and running, and given the open source libraries we’ve used, there is additional work to convert those. Considering Apple last shipped a PPC Mac nearly 4 years ago, I would expect the number of users that this affects to be small and shrinking. That said, we are open sourcing the plugin and will consider a PPC version if there is demand for one.
The plugin should work as far back as FMP 8.5 at least. Initially we’re not testing this far back ourselves, as BE requires FMP 11 anyway, so any other testing we do will come later.
We’ve been testing on Win XP and Win 7, but not Vista, even though Vista is a supported OS for FMP 11. There isn’t though anything to suggest it won’t run on Vista.
At present it’s a client side only plugin, so can’t be installed on FMS. This is definitely something we’re looking to do in a future version although it may not make it for 3.0.0. I’d like to have a server side import process working in BE3.
Citrix and TS should work fine, although we haven’t tested. If you have any feedback about this or can report success or failure, we’d love to know about it. We will have more options for plugin feedback once the open source code is released.